I was drawn here by two superb collections: Record Group 59 (the General Records of the Department of State) and RG 84 (the Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State). While preparing this volume, I spent many rewarding days in the research rooms and corridors of the National Archives, where I received the courteous assistance of people like Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries John Fawcett and archivists Ronald Swerczek and Gerald Haines. And, of course, my book is the second installment in a biography of one of the least understood of all American leaders. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914–1917, is also a book about politics, again of a special sort: the politics of philanthropy and humanitarian relief on a scale previously unknown and unimagined. The subject of my essay, and of the book that I have just published, is, in a way, diplomacy, but diplomacy of a special sort-indeed, of a character that the world had never seen before. But if I turned to her and said, 'Dear, when I behold you, time stands still,' that's diplomacy!' The senator replied: 'If I said to my wife, 'You have a face that would stop a thousand clocks,' that would be stupidity.

Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois was once asked by a group of junior high school students to define diplomacy.

Through the efforts of Hoover and the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, over 9 million people a day were fed in Belgium and Northern France.

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