Posted on 10/14/2014 10:59:57 AM PDT by SJackson
JNS.org - Ex-presidents seldom take an interest in Jewish affairs, with two notable exceptions. One is Jimmy Carter, who has repeatedly clashed with the Jewish community. Another is Herbert Hoover, an unlikely ally of the Jews who passed away 50 years ago this week (Oct. 20, 1964).
Most ex-presidents have gone quietly into the sunset, and some have taken issue with the few who have chosen to speak out on current affairs. George W. Bush, for example, last week had some strong words in reaction to fellow ex-president Carter’s public criticism of President Barack Obama’s Mideast policies. “To have a former president bloviating and second-guessing is, I don’t think, good for the presidency or the country,” Bush said.
Much of Carter’s post-presidential activity has revolved around Israel. He has repeatedly taken controversial stands, such as comparing Israeli policies to apartheid, urging the U.S. to withhold aid from Israel to force it to change its positions, and praising Hamas as “a legitimate political actor.”
Douglas Brinkley’s 1998 book, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House, furnished some embarrassing details about Carter’s relationship with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. According to Brinkley, Carter “developed a fondness for Arafat” based on his belief “that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God.” The former president went so far as to personally draft a speech for Arafat that he hoped would “help him to overcome the deficit understanding” for him in the West.
By contrast, Hoover, as ex-president, repeatedly took positions favorable to the Jewish community—even when it was not in his political interest to do so.
In early 1933, Jewish leaders asked president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt to join Hoover, the outgoing president, in a joint statement deploring the mistreatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. Hoover agreed to do so; Roosevelt declined. Before leaving office, Hoover instructed the U.S. ambassador in Germany, Frederic Sackett, “to exert every influence of our government” on the Hitler regime to halt the persecutions. But FDR soon replaced Sackett with William Dodd, and instructed Dodd that while he could “unofficially” take issue with Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism, he was not to issue any formal protests on the subject, since it was “not a [U.S.] governmental affair.”
Hoover publicly endorsed the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill to permit 20,000 German Jewish children to enter the U.S. outside the quota system. He also assisted the sponsors of the bill behind the scenes, by pressuring wavering members of the House Immigration Committee to support the measure. The endorsement of the only living former president gave the bill a significant boost.
He likely would have been able to accomplish more for Wagner-Rogers if not for some unfortunate partisan sniping. James G. McDonald, chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, believed the ex-president could rally important support for the effort. He suggested “that Mr. Herbert Hoover might assume leadership in raising funds and in administering the work of placing the children in suitable homes.” But Roosevelt administration officials blocked the proposal.
It is worth noting that Hoover’s stance on the bill ran counter to his own political interests, since he hoped to win the GOP presidential nomination in 1940, and most Republicans (like most Democrats) opposed increased immigration. Moreover, since Roosevelt was enormously popular in the Jewish community (he won about 90 percent of the Jewish vote in the previous election), Hoover had little reason to think that supporting Wagner-Rogers was going to win Jewish votes.
During the Holocaust years, Hoover associated himself with the activist Bergson Group, which lobbied for U.S. action to rescue Jewish refugees. He served on the Sponsoring Committee of Bergson’s protest pageant, “We Will Never Die.” The former president was also honorary chairman of Bergson’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and addressed the event via live radio hook-up.
Additionally, Hoover played a significant role in the decision to include a plank in the 1944 Republican Party platform urging the rescue of Europe’s Jews and supporting Jewish statehood in the British mandate of Palestine. It was the first time in American history that either major political party took such stands, and it forced the Democrats to adopt similar language at their convention later that year. As a result, support for Zionism and Israel became a permanent part of both parties’ platforms and a cornerstone of American political culture—and has remained so, even when challenged in recent years by another ex-president.
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Good read.
Hoover seems to me to be one of the most - if not THE most - wrongly maligned people in history (certainly in this country). Compared to Roosevelt, he was very wise and a saint, and compared to Carter...well, there is no comparison.
I am sure that Hoover is just about to celebrate his 50th anniversary of his arrival in Heaven...where will Carter be in a bit more than 50 years? Sweating it out, I think.
Carter has proven himself to be just another sicko Nazi, and certrainly not any kind of Christian!
He’s taken millions of dollars from the IslamoNazis in the middle east... he’s totally sold out .. his ridiculous anti-Semitic remarks are all bought, sold, and paid for...right into Carter’s bloated bank account.
I don’t know which is worse, a real enemy or a person who sells himself out to become our enemy
J. Carter. it stands for Judas Carter.
Pray for America.
We need His help to survive all these enemies within our once-great land.
Harry Truman left the White House nearly broke financially in 1953. It was Hoover who personally chipped in on a pension until Congress got one passed.
Show me any Democrat ex-president with a comparable record of humanitarianism. The last one who could even claim anything remotely close was Grover Cleveland.
Hoover was a better post-President than President.
Carter is the worst post-President ever, what a feat.
He was a pretty good pre-President too. Actually, a fine individual throughout his life, imo. Of course he bought into the idea that the solution to hard times was higher taxes and government spending and support programs. He was the first to confront that possibility in the first post income tax world. If he was a dope, what was FDR who expanded on his errors. Or the current occupant of the White House, doing the same thing 75 years later and expecting a different result.
No need to limit it to Democrats, though now humanitarianism=raising money.
Maybe not history, that’s too much to think about. Probably the most maligned President.
Pre-President, yes.
I’m gonna say Clinton was the worst Pre-President, he committed at least 3 rapes, allegedly, was a horrible Governor, lib law professor, college radical.
Well, at the risk of committing faint praise, I will say that Roosevelt was no improvement. But, as it turns out, FDR’s economic policies were pretty much just more of the same Hoover policies. And we saw how well that worked. Don’t be fooled by the fact that FDR made a political living lambasting Hoover - Hoover didn’t deficit spend as much a FDR, but he did set the record at the time.There was an enormous difference between the two on foreign policy, tho. And it’s hard to know how that would have played out, had Hoover somehow managed to unseat FDR in 1940. First of all, that was scarcely possible - but second, by inauguration day 1941 FDR was about halfway through an 18-month buildup of the military production capability leading up to Pearl Harbor - which in all likelihood FDR wanted to happen. FDR was keeping Britain afloat from the May, 1940 fall of France until - and long after - Pearl Harbor. So a pacifist-minded replacement for FDR early in 1940 would have made a huge difference to history.
It’s an unfathomable “what if” scenario, and politically it was never in the cards.
” Carter is the worst post-President ever, what a feat.”
Soon to be 2nd worst post-POTUS.
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