Truman secretly mailed a handwritten letter to Herbert Hoover in the spring of 1945, asking for his help with the humanitarian crisis in Europe as the war ended. He broke the news to the White House staff the next morning: "The president said he was going to tell us of something he had done last night on his own--and we might all throw bricks at him," press aide Eben Ayers recalled. But Truman knew that Hoover, an engineer before he was a president, was a great solver of complex problems, and proceeded in the next 18 months to send him on a 50,000 mile round the world tour, meeting with heads of state to distribute food to nations that faced famine.
Truman secretly mailed a handwritten letter to Herbert Hoover in the spring of 1945, asking for his help with the humanitarian crisis in Europe as the war ended. He broke the news to the White House staff the next morning: "The president said he was going to tell us of something he had done last night on his own--and we might all throw bricks at him," press aide Eben Ayers recalled. But Truman knew that Hoover, an engineer before he was a president, was a great solver of complex problems, and proceeded in the next 18 months to send him on a 50,000 mile round the world tour, meeting with heads of state to distribute food to nations that faced famine.
