Hoover for Smith

The job of Under Secretary of State is officially defined as "principal assistant of the Secretary of State in the discharge of his various functions, aiding in formulation and execution of the foreign policies of the Government ... In matters which do not require the personal attention of the Secretary of State, he acts for the Secretary of State, and in the absence of the Secretary of State, he becomes the acting Secretary of State." If the Secretary does not happen to care for administrative work, as John Foster Dulles does not, the Under Secretary becomes virtually the administrative head of the far-flung department.

Administration is duck soup for the incumbent Under Secretary, able, prickly W. Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's wartime Chief of Staff and postwar head of the Central Intelligence Agency. But Smith is leaving Government work because 1) he is not in good health (ulcers), and 2) he wants to make some money (as-executive vice president of American Machine & Foundry Co.). To succeed Smith, President Eisenhower last week appointed Herbert Hoover Jr., 51, son of the Republican ex-President. Hoover Jr. is a tall, unassuming engineer with diplomatic talents who carried off the oil settlement in Iran (TIME, Aug. 16). In the last hours of the 83rd Congress, the Senate confirmed Hoover's appointment without debate or dissent. He will take over his new job in October.

Percentage Figuring. A year ago, Herbert Hoover Jr. was as little known to the public eye as his father had been, say, in 1914. He was basking on a California beach last September, reading a newspaper account of the deadlock in Iran and feeling pleased that he was not mixed up in it, when Secretary Dulles called him on the phone from Washington. Would Hoover go to Iran, as a State Department special adviser, and see if he could bring the obdurate British and the stubborn Iranians together? Hoover would. He now assesses the job (with shrewd help from Ambassador Loy Henderson in Teheran) as 10% engineering, 15% negotiation, 75% ministering to emotional fevers. Old hands at the State Department appraise it as the finest one-man job since Dulles negotiated the Japanese peace treaty.

Hoover Jr. was born in London in 1903. One of his earliest memories is of riding into an Australian town with his father on a wagon loaded with freshly mined gold. He graduated from his father's university, Stanford, in 1925, and from Harvard's School of Business Administration, became an oil-exploration engineer, worked for the governments of Iran, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil. He founded the United Geophysical Co. in Pasadena and stayed on as president after it was bought out by Union Oil of California. He was also an airline engineer (with Western Air Express, a forerunner of the present T.W.A.). He is now a director of four or five companies. Although he is, not surprisingly, a Republican, he has taken no active part in politics, has favored no particular faction of the G.O.P.

Quiet Man. The year he graduated from Stanford, Hoover Jr. married; he now has three children, six grandchildren. His hobbies are fishing and radio; he was a radio "ham" at twelve, still has a license to operate W6ZH at Pasadena. Between 1930 and 1932 he was bedded with tuberculosis. He is a genial but diffident man who takes an occasional drink but has no bent for social doings; he is a conservative dresser and round-the-clock worker (8 a.m. to 8 p.m. or later). He has no discernible trace of political ambition. A friend recently described Hoover Jr. as "a lot like his father. Doesn't tell many stories or anything like that. And what he does tell are true ones."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.