Peregrine Worsthorne

Bourbon from Bush, envy from Nixon… and running into Herbert Hoover: encounters with eight presidents

Peregrine Worsthorne’s dealings with leaders of the free world, as a journalist, as a friend, and as a little boy running in the hallway

I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other. So in all likelihood my dreamed relationship with President Herbert Hoover — which began and ended in 1933 when I was aged 11 and only lasted for about a minute — came nearer to being a genuine human relationship than all the other journalistic ones later — which included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, LBJ, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Quite a mouthful.

My Hoover story — to the best of my childish memory — happened like this. Having just been humiliatingly defeated by Franklin Roosevelt, on account of his disastrous handling of the Depression, Hoover was in London to visit the great interwar governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman — himself a hate figure because of this hardline capitalism — who happened to be my stepfather. His home telegraphic address at this time was ‘The Red House, London’. Normally my brother and I were kept out of the way when great personages — like Hitler’s Dr Schacht — visited our home. But on this occasion, by some accident, I literally ran into the great personage in the hall. This much-hated figure, however, could not have been more sympathetic. Putting an avuncular arm around my shoulder, he said, ‘You, my boy, are lucky enough still to live in the Red House, London, while I have just been kicked out of the White House, Washington.’ Expecting chastisement, this sympathetic reaction won my heart, and as a result I could never again entirely believe in his malign reputation.

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