The Daily Alaska empire., 1933-01-30
Memoirs of the President.
(New York Herald Tribune)

l President Hoover it is reported will leave office accompanied by fewer than eightytwo filing containing the personal records of his tenure and in due course the material will be distilled into complete and authoritative account of his own contribution to the exciting history of the times This quite natural; yet in that fact itself there is interesting commentary upon the chang ing world in which we live. Victorian statesmen were not confronted, they laid down the cares of office by a ravenous horde of candidates for Ph. D. degrees demanding all the secrets of their stewardship and on the theory that it the office rather than the which counted, earlier Ameri- can Presidents were permitted to retire into a privacy that only posterity might disturb
 When President Grant compiled his Personal Memoirs there a fainty raffish note about the enterprise His contemporaries were inclined to find excuses Gin the state of the Generals private fi- lnances) for what would now be regarded as prac- ticaly public duty. Theodore Roosevelt published his Autobiography but that was hardly more than a scrapbook of chatty reminiscence, unladen with the solid Recommendation which almost every public man is supposed to owe his publc-and the historians Other residents have left their fame to the dignified hand of posthumous biography and the idea that Cleveland or Mckinley or Taft was under any obligation to explain his record in office would hardly have occurred to his contemporaries. Even the Wilson papers still being doled out by the estate through the placid channel of MT. Ray Stannard Bakers account, while innumerable
 
 tion which would undoubtedly be useful and per- haps important to the Nation
 The reticence, however which was once &C., lcepted as an obvious proprety, is now often a source of only irritated indignation. It is-as lalways-the which is responsible. The pro- duced that strange flood of memoirs, beginning with Colonel Repington, swelling to the mighty torrent in which nearly all the European statesmen and many | of the Ameican explained why they were not responsible and still trickling with such final Peyton C. March. Its purpose was largely excupa- tory it's result peculiar. It has fastened public attention once more upon the men and diverted il somewhat from the larger events behind which they moved
 | It has taught reading publics to dismiss sucf broad generates as are enshrined in the diplo- matic correspondence and, instead, to demand knowledge as to just what Ambassador said to Lady at tea on such and such an occasion. Peo- pie have become impatient of the published com munique, and want to know instead whether the Secretary of State who issued it had indigestion that morning, what the big banker wrote to hin the night before. In these details, our age appears to believe, the inside story lies, and as result the inside lives of it's public figures have beer seized upon as public property which the great mer have no right to withhold Compiling ones memoirs has become almost as much an obligation of higf office as compiling annual report. Perhaps i | is not bad thing, on the whole and in MT Hoover's case, at any rate, the result will hav an unusual interest and public importance Th President has dealt with very great events, ant his record of them should be standard contribu ton to the history of the times.