Unpierced Facade

OUR UNKNOWN EX-PRESIDENT: A PORTRAIT OF HERBERT HOOVER (340 pp.)-- Eugene Lyons--Doubleday ($2.95).

In this embarrassingly worshipful biography, Eugene Lyons has set out to portray "the warm, whimsical, and tender Hoover . . . the very human and deeply humane Quaker behind the solemn fac,ade." With a convert's zeal, rightish Political Journalist Lyons, a onetime fellow traveler, also tries to give a more favorable version of Hoover's administration. It is a hard, loving, earnest try--but it doesn't quite come off.

A good part of Lyons' story is convincing. The Quaker boy putting himself through college by delivering laundry, working in a Sierra mine camp, becoming a brilliant, wealthy engineer--all this is good, moving Horatio Alger stuff. And Lyons is doubtless on the side of historical justice when he insists that President Hoover was 1) not responsible for the depression, and 2) anticipated many of the economic remedies for which his successor was later hailed.

But Lyons fails to make the only living ex-President of the U.S. "warm, whimsical" or very human. He has even desperately collected specimens of Hoover's "humor." Readers will gain new respect for Hoover's intelligence, stubborn integrity and devotion to public welfare, but in Lyons' pages he remains an unbending, inaccessible man in a stiff collar, a man peculiarly unfitted for the cutthroat rough & tumble of political life.

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