🚨Herbert Hoover Is Dead

Oct. 19, 1964 - RFK and Humphrey in Garment District [have pic]

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🚨Herbert Hoover Is Dead

🚨Oct. 20, 1964 - Herbert Hoover, former President of the United States, died in New York City today at the age of 90.

Death came at 11:35 a.m. in his suite on the 31st floor of the Waldorf Towers, following massive internal bleeding that began Saturday. His two sons were with him as he slipped into a deep coma that kept his final hours free of pain.

Physicians and nurses had worked ceaselessly since he was stricken to prolong his final days. They arrested the bleeding in the upper intestinal tract and gave him frequent transfusions.

But toxins poisoned his weakened system and, when bleeding recurred early today, his heart could no longer take the strain. By 8 a.m., it was apparent that his illness was terminal.

Hoover, born in an Iowa village, the son of a Quaker blacksmith, was an exponent of a credo of personal initiative that he summed up as “rugged individualism,” and his life exemplified it.

His parents were poor, and he was orphaned at nine, but he amassed a fortune as a mine engineer and owner.

With the start of World War I, he directed the evacuation of 200,000 Americans from Europe. It was the first of a series of massive economic, evacuation, and food relief activities that spanned half a century. He was Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations and was elected President on the Republican ticket in 1928.

The crash of the stock market on Oct. 29, 1929, plunged the nation into its worst economic crisis in history. Hoover’s policies were attacked as insufficient to spur economic revival. He was voted out of office in 1932 under the cloud of the Great Depression, called the “Hoover Depression” by his opponents.

Some later judgments, however, have suggested that he was the victim of events that coincided with his tenure. And 30 years of public service, including tasks for two Presidents after he left the White House, restored him in the affections of millions.

At news of Hoover’s death, President Johnson proclaimed a 30-day mourning period and ordered the flags lowered to half-staff at the White House and on all Federal buildings and grounds in the nation, on Navy vessels at sea, and at embassies and military stations abroad.

Hoover’s death leaves the nation with two living former Presidents: Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican.

Only one other President lived to be 90 — John Adams, the second President, a Federalist, who was 90 years and 247 days old when he died on July 4, 1826 (the same day that Thomas Jefferson, the third President, died). Hoover was 90 years and 71 days old at death.

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