Defining

Moments
The First One Hundred Years
of the Hoover Institution

BER TR A ND M . PATENAUD E
 CONTENTS
Foreword by George P. Shultz

1 FOUNDATIONS
Remember the Lusitania!

2 THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER

The Nazi-Soviet Pact
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Herbert Hoover and Poland
The Okhrana Collection Revealed
Alexander Kerensky at Hoover
Nicolas de Basily Room

3 HOOVER BECOMES A THINK TANK

Truth as a Weapon: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Ten Landmark Books by Hoover Fellows
George Stigler
The United States in the 1980s

4 INTO A NEW CENTURY

Robert Conquest
Gorbachev at Stanford, 1990 and 1992
Microfilming Soviet Communist Party Documents
Thatcher on the Quad
President George W. Bush and the Hoover Institution, 2006
Hoover Nobel Laureates in Economics
Firing Line
Honors and Awards
Chiang Kai-shek’s Diaries

Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index

GEORGE P. SHULTZ
Hoover Tower as seen from the
Stanford Quad during a Hoover
event.
FOREWORD
What is the Hoover Institution about? Its purpose is to look toward the future
and develop policies that will have an impact on the betterment of society and
our prospects for peace. Yet even as it looks ahead, Hoover can find inspiration
from its past.
Reflecting on my association with Hoover over the past three decades, here
are a few experiences that have stayed with me.
In 2006 I was invited to a gathering in Brussels to honor the memory of
Herbert Hoover. The event was called “Remembering Herbert Hoover and the
Commission for Relief in Belgium.” An exhibition was set up with documentation
and a room filled with memorabilia from the days of Hoover relief described in
these pages. Top Belgian government officials were in attendance. The exhibition
and the discussion focused on the actions that Hoover took when the Belgians
were threatened with starvation during World War I. The Germans had invaded
and occupied nearly all of Belgium in the early weeks of the war. Germany’s
enemy, Great Britain, had responded by imposing a naval blockade on Germany,
which included the ports of German-occupied Belgium. As a food-importing
population before the war, the Belgians were desperate, as their native food supply
was quickly running out. Hoover came along, negotiated successfully with both
the Germans and the Allies, and, as head of the neutral Commission for Relief in
Belgium (CRB), worked with the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation
(National Food and Relief Committee) to import food to Belgium, using funds
he himself secured to pay for the food and shipping. Throughout this effort,
the food delivered by the CRB was efficiently distributed by Belgians under the
oversight of Hoover and his commission. The Belgian civilian population—more
than seven million people—was saved from starvation by Herbert Hoover.
When the CRB finished its enormous undertaking shortly after World War I,
Hoover used some of the remaining funds to establish a foundation to help wor-
thy Belgians study in the United States. Known today as the Belgian American
5
 Educational Foundation (BAEF), it is still active nearly a century after its found-
ing. Belgian economist Jacques Drèze, a good friend and colleague who visited
me at the University of Chicago, attended the 2006 Hoover ceremony in Brussels
at my invitation. As the event ended, he said that his life had been transformed
by his BAEF scholarship, which allowed him to study economics at Columbia
University.
On another occasion, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visited me
at the Hoover Institution in 1992. At an exhibition set up especially for his visit, A
Century of Revolutions: Lenin to Gorbachev, he viewed a map showing the oper-
ations of Herbert Hoover’s post–World War I American Relief Administration
(ARA) in Soviet Russia during the famine of 1921–22. On the map he saw a marker
of an ARA relief station near his little hometown in southern Russia. Tears filled
his eyes as he recalled his parents talking gratefully about the ARA.
Herbert Hoover was inspired by idealism, yet he placed a premium on effi-
ciency and was immensely practical as a mining engineer, humanitarian, secre-
tary of commerce, president, and adviser to President Truman. This dual legacy
has been carried forward in the outstanding intellectual contributions made by
Hoover fellows over the years. I remember Milton Friedman’s 1980 documen-
tary series Free to Choose and the book of the same name that he wrote with his
wife, Rose. They showed the way to a strong economy here and elsewhere. The
TV series was viewed by millions, and the tie-in book topped the bestseller lists
for months on end. Then there was historian Robert Conquest, who, with the
help of the Hoover Archives, wrote hard-hitting books about the history of the
Soviet Union, especially the Stalin era. He got some backlash from historians
who believed he had an ideological axe to grind, but the opening of the Soviet
archives after 1991 confirmed that Conquest had it right.
Put it all together and you have in the Hoover Institution an inspiring history
of human outreach, organizational skill, and economic and historical excellence.
There is much to inspire and much to live up to.
I recently attended a conference at Stanford on artificial intelligence. It was a
stirring event addressed by such notables as Bill Gates, Governor Gavin Newsom,
and Henry Kissinger. The conference was held in the Traitel Building, a magnif-
icent new addition to the Hoover Institution that provides a venue for the lively
exchange of ideas to the entire Stanford community. I use this building regularly
for conferences related to my project on governance in an emerging new world,
which starts from the observation that the world is changing rapidly and radi-
cally. We need to understand these developments and generate ideas for how to
respond to them in ways that take advantage of new opportunities and, as much
as possible, head off potential downsides. We hold deep discussions of papers on

6
various subjects in Hoover’s Annenberg Conference Room and then move to the
new Hauck Auditorium for panel discussions that are open to members of the
greater Stanford community, who come to listen and ask searching questions.
So even with its independent funding, Hoover is very much a part of this
great university. I have always felt that Hoover has a great advantage over the
many stand-alone think tanks located in Washington, DC. Whereas they are
almost inevitably drawn into immediate issues and controversies, Hoover can
take a strategic point of view from a distance. We can then bring that viewpoint
to the nation’s capital with the help of our wonderful new Johnson Center in
Washington.
From the seed of an idea planted a century ago by Herbert Hoover in the form
of an ambitious enterprise to document the causes and consequences of World
War I and thereby promote peace among people all over the world, Hoover has
grown into a vibrant institution filled with interesting, collaborative, and ener-
getic people who are making a difference and enjoying a chance to—in Hoover’s
famous motto—contribute “ideas defining a free society.” We look forward to the
next one hundred years.

—
g eorge p. shultz
Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California

7
 to attach to this design the stacks, reading rooms, offices, and archive and film
vaults required for his library. Fund-raising proved difficult, especially given
the founder’s reluctance to engage in raising funds while he was serving as sec-
retary of commerce. By 1929 the Hoover War Library had accumulated more
than 1,400,000 items — both archival and published materials — and the need
for additional space had become acute. The fund-raisers and the Hoover War
Library’s directors were forced to reconsider their plans, and for a time in 1930
even considered constructing an inexpensive “utilitarian building” connected to
the University Library. One result of the delay — felicitous, in retrospect — was the
separation of the Hoover War Library from the proposed Stanford War Memorial
building, which was completed in 1937, without a tower, and is today known as
Memorial Auditorium.
Herbert Hoover’s departure from the White House in 1933 meant that he was
no longer inhibited from fund-raising for his institution. By then, the need for
additional space inside the University Library was becoming critical, not only in
the stacks and the vault but also in the reading room, as undergraduates began
to use the library in greater numbers. In 1930 Hoover Library materials occupied
the entire ground level of the stacks of the University Library building and had
overflowed into the second level. The opening of a Hoover archives room in
1934 — to house the papers of the CRB, the ARA, the Food Administration, the
Herbert Hoover Collection, and the Ray Lyman Wilbur Collection on Social
Problems — helped relieve the congestion, but before long the need for additional
space again became pressing.
Meanwhile the search for building funds continued. The major breakthrough
came in May 1937, when the American Relief Administration finally liquidated
and endowed more than $140,000 to Stanford for the erection of a building to
house the Hoover War Library. In late 1938 the Belgian American Educational
Foundation, a legacy of the CRB whose president was Rickard, donated $300,000
toward construction of the proposed building, with the proviso that the university
cover the $100,000 still outstanding and assume the costs of maintenance. The
university’s trustees agreed. John Rockefeller Jr. gave $50,000, and the balance
of the $600,000 required funding came from numerous smaller individual
donations.
The question of what kind of structure to build had been decided in favor of
a tower, which would relieve the low roof lines of the campus’s Spanish Mission–
style quadrangle. The design was contracted to Arthur Brown Jr., of the firm
Bakewell and Brown, who had designed several buildings on campus, including
one of its architectural gems, the University Library, as well as San Francisco’s
Beaux Arts city hall (after the original was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake)
Joseph Stalin smiles for the camera
and shakes hands with German for-
eign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop,
as Red Army chief of staff Boris
Shaposhnikov (center back) and
German SS officer Richard Schulze
look on. Photographs are from
Ribbentrop’s personal album.
THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT
The most notorious treaty of the twentieth century was the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It was
signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by German foreign minister Joachim
von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. The public
part of the treaty was a statement of nonaggression and friendship between
the two countries. The treaty’s secret protocols stipulated that “in the event
of a territorial and political rearrangement” the Soviet Union would be given
preponderant influence in the Baltics and that Poland would be divided into
German and Soviet sectors. On their part, the Soviets pledged to remain neutral
in the event of a war between Germany and Poland or between Germany and
the Western powers.
The shock produced by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact can
hardly be exaggerated. The two powers were viewed as ideological opposites,
yet here they were declaring their mutual friendship. The treaty would not last
even two years before being dramatically nullified by the German invasion of the
Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. For the time being, it gave Hitler the free hand
he wanted for Germany to invade Poland, which it did September 1. Two days
later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. On September 18, German
forces moving eastward into Poland met the westward-bound Soviet forces at
Brest-Litovsk. Poland had disappeared from the map.
The Hoover Archives holds two albums of photographs of Ribbentrop’s visit
to Moscow to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The photographs, taken by Ribbentrop’s
private photographer, provide a unique and vivid record of the event. Because
we know the aftermath, there is a surreal quality to the images of the signing
ceremony, the apparent good cheer of the participants presenting a striking
counterpoint to the enormous human misery about to be unleashed by the pact.
The albums came to the Hoover Archives in 1968 as a gift from Colonel William
R. Philp, a retired US Army officer living in San Francisco. Philp had been an
intelligence officer who advised on the Normandy invasion plans, served with
General George Patton on the continent, and was the chief of intelligence for
the US Army dealing with the prisoners awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Philp’s
collection included X-rays of Hitler’s head and teeth, taken after the failed
attempt on his life on July 20, 1944 — another of Hoover’s archival treasures.

32 defining moments the view from the tower 33

made part of the university’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and of course his
request was granted. The dedication ceremony took place on June 20.
The dedication assembly was held at Memorial Auditorium, directly across
from the tower, at 3:30 in the afternoon, with Stanford president Wilbur presiding
and featuring speeches by Charles H. Brown, president of the American Library
Association; Sidney B. Fay, professor of history at Harvard; and Charles Seymour,
president of Yale University. The proceedings were marked by somber reflections
about the previous war and the new conflagration. This ceremony was followed at
4:30 by a carillon concert from the tower given by Kamiel Lefévère, carillonneur
of Riverside Church in New York. Lefévère, a Belgian-American carillonneur
and composer, had arrived at Stanford along with the bells. He oversaw the dis-
mantling of the carillon in New York, its transport by ship from Brooklyn to San
Francisco, and its reassembly inside Hoover Tower.
The concert was followed at 5:00 by formal exercises of dedication in Library
Plaza, as the area in front of the tower was then called. The ceremony was broad-
cast live by NBC affiliate KGO, San Francisco. It opened with the carillon playing
“America the Beautiful” and ended with “The Star Spangled Banner.” Presiding
was Leland Cutler, chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees. The invocation
was delivered by Stanford chaplain David Elton Trueblood, a longtime friend of
Herbert Hoover’s. Among the speakers at the podium on the steps of the Tower,
Yale president Seymour was not alone in invoking the war, revolution, and peace
of the Hoover Library’s name:

The significance of the collections here housed cannot be overstated, for

they will serve not merely historians but mankind. The chief dangers now
threatening civilization proceed, I think, from ignorance, from disease,
and from war. Only through a knowledge that will guide us to the dis-
covery of a political substitute for war can we hope to conquer the other
dangers, to control the revolution that inevitably springs from total war,
to attain the peace that will enable us to fight disease instead of men and
will guarantee the free enlightenment of the mind.41

In his remarks, Hoover employed an incantatory device to describe the col-

above Tower dedication ceremony
lections amassed in the Tower behind him: as seen from Memorial Auditorium,
June 20, 1941.
Here are not alone published books. They are easy to obtain. But here top right Tower carillon bells,
are the fugitive documents which quickly disappear. Here are the inner undated photograph.

records of governments, of minutes of war councils and war departments, bottom right Herbert Hoover
Hoover Tower under construction. records of peace negotiations, economic and social organizations over speaking at the dedication ceremony.

36 defining moments the view from the tower 37

8

Hoover chairman Harold H. Fisher
(seated) and vice chairman C. Easton
Rothwell, c. 1951.
42
above The “Big Four” in Yan’an: left
to right, Po Ku, Zhou En-lai, Zhu De,
and Mao Zedong, 1937. Photograph
by Helen Foster Snow.
facing page Phili (Pierre Grach),
Libération, France, 1944.
46
nearly doubled. “It has now reached the point,” noted Vice Chairman Rothwell
in an internal report in 1951, “where this traffic will seriously interfere with the
use of the building as a library and research center unless changes are made to
isolate the working space from the tourist traffic.”46 And so the entrance to the
reading room was sealed off with a glass wall to ensure quiet. Today, the annual
number of visitors to the Hoover Tower’s observation platform exceeds 125,000.
Hoover Tower figured prominently in the celebrations on campus marking
the end of the Second World War. On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe (V-E) Day,
carillonneur James R. Lawson played a recital on the Hoover Tower carillon.
The program included “Victory Rhapsody for Carillon,” composed especially
for V-E Day by Percival Price, carillonneur of the University of Michigan. It had
been widely distributed and was played simultaneously that day in bell towers
throughout the country. The Hoover Tower carillon program also included the
national anthems of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet
Union. The hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” — “A Mighty Fortress Is Our
God” — concluded the recital. It had last been played on the Hoover Tower car-
illon on December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
POSTWAR BOOM
Hoover’s acquisitions in the first years after the war were more extensive, and
more outstanding, than for any period of the library’s history since the arrival
of the founding collections in the first years after World War I. Central Europe
continued to be a focus, but now Japan and China became major collecting areas.
As in the past, the founder took the lead in building the library’s collections on
World War II and its aftermath. By the end of 1944, Hoover had raised some
$235,000 in gifts and pledges, including $50,000 from his old friend and previous
donor Jeremiah Milbank, for acquisitions. And there was much more to come. HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
The global scope of the Second World War, combined with the influence of These three frames were made from film footage
the training schools for army and navy officers conducted under the auspices taken of the atomic explosion over Nagasaki, Japan,
of the Hoover Institute, inspired the acquisition of outstanding collections on on August 9, 1945. Three days earlier, the US Army
the Pacific and East Asia. As Hoover librarian Philip T. McLean, successor to B-29 Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on
Nina Almond, wrote in 1949, “The holdings of the Library have been expanded Hiroshima. Original film footage of the Hiroshima
to global scope. They now document developments in all major regions of the and Nagasaki bombings — the only such film in exis-
world, with special emphasis upon certain leading countries in each region. tence — was donated to the Hoover Library & Archives
The Library’s resources also illumine the history and evolution of universal in 1980 by Harold Agnew, a physicist who monitored
trends and international movements which have no regional boundaries.”47 The the Hiroshima bombing from The Great Artiste, the
accumulation of new materials in the first five postwar years more than doubled instrument plane that accompanied the Enola Gay
the prewar holdings of the Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, on its mission. Agnew’s papers at Hoover include the
and Peace. original strike orders for both bombings.
defining moments the view from the tower 43
Arthur Wright. They were living in Peking (Beijing) when
the Japanese invaded and were interned there until the city
was liberated by American paratroopers in October 1945.
Answering a call from the Hoover Library for assistance with
collecting, the Wrights, with Peking as their home base, trav-
eled extensively throughout China, picking up newspapers,
pamphlets, and books along the way and shipping them back
to Peking and then on to Stanford. Courtesy of the US Air
Force, Mary Wright was able to fly to Yan’an, headquarters
of the Chinese Communist Party before it fell to Nationalist
troops on March 19, 1947, and collect materials there.
In 1947 the Wrights returned to the United States.
Arthur joined the faculty at Stanford University, while Mary
accepted an appointment as curator of the China collec-
tion at the Hoover Library. (She obtained a PhD in history
from Radcliffe College in 1951.) “Thanks to the generosity of
Mr. Milbank and the ability and energy of Mrs. Wright, our
Curator for China,” noted a 1951 Hoover internal report, “we
have what is acknowledged by all competent authorities to
be the outstanding collection on contemporary China. These
materials are indispensable for the study of the nationalist
and communist movements. The closing of China to the
Western world [in 1949] has enormously increased their
importance and their value.”49
The Hoover Library proceeded to build on these sturdy
foundations. It acquired the papers of Joseph Stilwell, one
of the most colorful American officers of World War II.
When the United States entered the war, its chief focus
was on defeating Hitler first; the war in Asia would have to
wait. But in the meantime, it was important to keep China
from falling to the Japanese. To help bolster the military
effort of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, in 1942 President
Franklin Roosevelt designated Lieutenant General Stilwell
to serve as commanding general of US Army forces in the
China-Burma-India theater. Relations between “Vinegar Joe”
Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek were seldom cordial and slowly
turned venomous, ultimately leading to Stilwell’s removal.
Stilwell kept a diary for most of his life, and its cover-
age of his time in China and his troubled relationship with
defining moments the view from the tower 47
9
 THE UNITED STATES IN THE 1980s

This landmark publication appeared in print on July 1,

1980, four months before Ronald Reagan’s election as
US president. In 1980, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line
devoted back-to-back programs to The United States
in the 1980s, featuring six Hoover fellows discussing
the policy proposals advocated in the book. Buckley
introduced the broadcast by remarking, “The Hoover
Institution of Stanford, California, is a caravanserai for
worldly scholars who seek to advance public policy
toward freedom and security.”91
During a 1985 meeting in Moscow with secretary of
state George Shultz, Soviet Communist Party general
secretary Mikhail Gorbachev conveyed the Kremlin’s
understanding that the book was a policy handbook
for the Reagan administration. “We know what you top left A special two-part episode
of Firing Line was devoted to a
think,” Gorbachev told Shultz. “We have read this book
discussion of the Hoover Institution
and watched all its programs become adopted by the publication The United States in the
Reagan Administration.”92 1980s. Guests seen with host William
F. Buckley (left) here are (left to
right) Edward Teller, Peter Duignan,
and Richard Staar.
top left Milton Friedman standing to
top right (Left to right) Firing Line make a point at a tax conference held
host William F. Buckley with guests in Stauffer Auditorium, January 1981.
Alvin Rabushka, Rita Ricardo-
Campell, and Martin Anderson. top right Free to Choose publicity
poster, 1982.
above Alvin Rabushka (left) and
Peter Duignan, editors of The United bottom right Publicity photo for
States in the 1980s, c. 1980. television series Free to Choose, 1980.

90 defining moments hoover becomes a think tank 91

the Hoover Institution, in the form of the original Liberty Loan poster depicting
his death and confirming his quoted pledge: “I will fight cheerfully and do my
utmost as if the whole issue of the struggle depended on me alone.” Hoover fellow
Martin Anderson presented an original copy of the poster to President Reagan
at a White House cabinet meeting. On January 11, 1982, the Hoover Institution
Board of Overseers convened for a dinner at the White House, where President
Reagan addressed the gathering. “Over its distinguished career,” the president said, facing page President Reagan with
speechwriters during an Oval Office
“the Hoover Institution deserves to be singled out for its service, its standards,
meeting to discuss the upcoming
and its contributions.” With Hoover’s Treptow poster in mind, Reagan remarked, G7 Economic Summit, May 18, 1987.
“I have reason to know nothing is impossible to the Hoover Institution.”97 Seated at center of the facing couch is
future Hoover research fellow Peter
Hoover fellows played key roles inside the Reagan administration, especially Robinson.
during Reagan’s first term. Roger Freeman was a member of president-elect
above President Reagan making his
Reagan’s Inflation Policy Task Force and Spending Control Task Force. Martin Berlin Wall speech at the Brandenburg
Anderson served as the White House director of policy development during the Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987.

96 defining moments hoover becomes a think tank 97

10
 Hoover fellows also played visible roles during the early post-Soviet years. A
team of Hoover economists, among them Annelise Anderson, Mikhail Bernstam,
and Edward Lazear, made several trips to Russia and other states of the former
Soviet Union to provide advice to the Yeltsin government on the transition to
a market economy. In 1995, the Hoover Institution published one of the fruits
of that effort, Economic Transition in Eastern Europe and Russia: Realities of
Reform, a book edited by Lazear, who contributed an essay, as did Hoover fellows
Anderson, Larry Diamond, Charles McLure Jr., Thomas Moore, and Sherwin
Rosen.
By the mid-1990s, the initial euphoria that accompanied the downfall of
communism was wearing off as newly liberated societies faced daunting eco-
nomic and political realities. “The collapse of communism and rapid retreat from
socialism and central planning, together with global recognition of the virtues of
democracy and free markets, encouraged many political leaderships in former
communist and developing countries to initiate dramatic transitions during the
first half of this decade,” Raisian wrote in the Hoover annual report for 1995.
“Unfortunately, those first years of transition were deceptively easy, as change
seemed to move forward without significant opposition. More recently, it has
become apparent that these transitions to democracy and free markets are much
more difficult to accomplish than first imagined and that in many countries the
process of reform is coming under serious challenge.”101 The institution’s response
was to adjust to the new circumstances by refocusing its research and scholarship
on analyzing the particular challenges confronting the newly enfranchised but
increasingly disillusioned electorates. These challenges varied from country to
country and from culture to culture as fledgling democracies struggled to gain
stability and legitimacy and to perform effectively.
An enduring Hoover contribution to societies transitioning from com-
munism took the form of an initiative called the Diplomat Training Program.
Established in 1990 with the generous support of the Pew Charitable Trusts, and
under the direction of Hoover associate director Richard Sousa, the Diplomat
Training Program was designed to help prepare young diplomats from the
emerging democracies of former communist countries for positions of leader-
ship by exposing them to the intellectual and academic resources of the Hoover
Institution and Stanford University. In eleven separate sessions during the
program’s six-year span, 138 diplomats from the foreign ministries of Armenia,
Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia,
Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine spent an academic quarter in resi-
dence at Hoover engaged in rigorous course work in economics, international
relations, statecraft, and security affairs. Site visits to prominent California
106 defining moments
agribusinesses, high-tech companies, financial institutions, and news organi-
zations were an integral part of the program, as was participation in cultural
and social events.
Near the conclusion of each session, participants spent a week in Washington,
DC, to gain firsthand exposure to many of the national and international
institutions they had studied during their stay at Hoover. Included were the
Department of Defense, the US Congress, the Office of Management and Budget,
the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the International Monetary Fund, and the
World Bank. Finally, they visited their respective embassies in Washington and
met with their ambassador to the United States and embassy staff.
Soon after their return to their home countries, many of the program’s alumni
assumed new and expanded responsibilities in their ministries, were posted to
positions in the United States, or were assigned to the US desks in their home
offices. Several of the participants rose to prominent positions within their foreign
ministries. Ambassadors and foreign ministers praised the program for its many
The pavilion of the David and Joan
contributions to their countries’ futures, as well as for enhancing their countries’
Traitel Building. relations with the United States.
110 defining moments
top Distinguished Fellow George
Shultz presents Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev with an orig-
inal copy of a 1921 Soviet literacy
poster from the Hoover Archives
at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium,
June 4, 1990. The poster caption
translates as: “Long live the sun!
May the darkness vanish!”
into a new century
into a new century
GORBACHEV AT STANFORD, 1990 AND 1992
On June 4, 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visited
Stanford University, where he delivered a nationally tele-
vised speech in Memorial Auditorium. Thanks to George
Shultz, the best-remembered moment of the event was
Hoover inspired. Shultz presented the Soviet leader with
an original 1921 Soviet political poster from the Hoover
Archives: a literacy poster quoting the great Russian poet
Alexander Pushkin: “Long live the sun! May the darkness be
hidden!” Gorbachev was visibly moved by the presentation.
In 1992, a year after the dissolution of the USSR, for-
mer president Gorbachev returned to Stanford, and on that
occasion he visited the Hoover Institution with his wife,
Raisa. The visit included a tour of a Hoover exhibition spe-
cially organized for the occasion, A Century of Revolutions:
Lenin to Gorbachev, featuring treasures from the Russian
and Soviet collections. At the exhibition, Gorbachev was
drawn to two items in particular. One was a map of feeding
stations of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration
(ARA) in Soviet Russia in 1922 that showed Gorbachev’s
hometown in southern Russia. He recalled his parents
speaking favorably about the good work done by the ARA.
Gorbachev also lingered over the drafts of the 1917 abdica-
tion statement of Tsar Nicholas II — perhaps pondering his
own nonviolent ouster from power in the context of the last
Romanov tsar’s tragic fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
In the 1990s, the Hoover Institution concluded an agree-
ment with the former Soviet president and the Gorbachev
Foundation to undertake a Cold War oral-history project.
About forty of Gorbachev’s key advisers were interviewed,
as were an equal number of US officials who had been on
the other side of the process that brought the Cold War
bottom Director John Raisian
to an end. The records of all the interviews are held in the
(far left) and Distinguished Fellow Hoover Archives. They served as the basis for the Hoover
George P. Shultz (far right) with
Institution Press book Turning Points in the Ending of the
Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife,
Raisa, in the Herbert Hoover Cold War (2007), a collection of essays edited by Hoover
Memorial Exhibit Pavilion during fellow Kiron Skinner.
the Gorbachevs’ May 1992 tour of
the Hoover Institution.
107
IDEAS DEFINING A FREE SOCIETY
At the start of his tenure as director, John Raisian enlisted the Hoover fellows
in the task of defining and describing a guiding vision for the institution’s
research programs in the post–Cold War era. “I distinctly recall chatting with
Milton Friedman at an early stage in this process and asking him what he felt
Hoover should stand for,” Raisian later recalled. Friedman’s reply was emphatic:
“Freedom, freedom, freedom — political, economic, and social freedom.”102
Raisian took this as his cue, launching interdisciplinary research initiatives
grouped under three programs, each with freedom as its core theme: Democracy
and Free Markets, American Institutions and Economic Performance, and
International Rivalries and Global Cooperation. Under the auspices of the
American Institutions and Economic Performance initiative, Hoover fellow
John Cogan organized a conference at Hoover in May 1992 titled Visions of
America: Reforming American Institutions, which brought together Hoover
fellows, business leaders, and government officials. It was the first of the major
post–Cold War conferences at Hoover whose goal was to generate fresh ideas
for revitalizing American institutions, and it set the tone for the institution’s
expanding agenda in the area of domestic reform in the decade ahead. The
conference participants examined four major topics: Congress and the executive
branch, the economy and financial institutions, education reform, and Congress
and the budget.
It was Raisian who, in the mid-1990s, introduced Hoover’s tag line, “Ideas
Defining a Free Society,” a motto that has held up remarkably well over the years
as an encapsulation of Hoover’s fundamental mission. In 1995, the institution
launched a five-year fundraising campaign titled Ideas Defining a Free Society . . .
Investing in Knowledge and Scholarship. The campaign was aimed at supporting
the continued growth of Hoover’s Library & Archives collections, expanding its
public-policy research, ensuring the continuity of its scholarly excellence, and
significantly increasing both its output and its outreach. The campaign set ambi-
tious goals: to raise $75 million and to double the donor base, cultivating a new
generation of supporters who shared Hoover’s commitment to strengthening indi-
vidual freedom, private enterprise, and representative government. The campaign
invoked the philosophy and values of the founder, Herbert Hoover, in particular
his charge that his institution “must constantly and dynamically point the road to
peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system.”
The five-year campaign, which concluded on August 30, 2000, was the most
successful fund-raising drive in the institution’s history, surpassing its three
financial goals by considerable margins. The overall goal for the campaign was
to raise $75 million in new gifts and pledges. In total, more than $101 million
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11
Defining Moments
The First One Hundred Years
of the Hoover Institution
BY B E R T R A N D M . PAT E N AU DE

Cloth: 978-0-8179-2274-0 $49.95

PDF: 978-0-8179-2278-8 $10.99
168 pages | 11 x 9.5 in. | August 2019
History | United States—20th Century | United States—21st Century

A century ago, amid the devastation of World War I, Herbert Hoover established
a collection of library and archival materials at Stanford University dedicated to
the causes and consequences of war. Founded as the Hoover War Collection in
1919, the institution has evolved into one of the world’s premier research centers
devoted to the advanced study of politics, economics, and international affairs.
Defining Moments charts the origins and growth of what is today the
Hoover Institution over the course of a century of global upheaval, from World
War I and the Russian Revolution, through World War II and the Cold War, to
the rapidly developing challenges we face today. The connecting thread is the
notion encapsulated in the institution’s slogan, Ideas Defining A Free Society:
that American values of democracy, capitalism, and freedom can serve as a
blueprint for improving lives around the world.

Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and

the author of many books, including The Big Show in Bololand: The American
Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (2002), winner of
the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and the basis for the PBS documen-
tary film The Great Famine (2011). Other books include A Wealth of Ideas:
Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (2006) and Trotsky: Downfall
of a Revolutionary (2009). Patenaude teaches history and international relations
at Stanford University.

Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6003
www.hooverpress.org Copyright © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University