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

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.