In 1932, World War I veterans gathered in Washington to demand their bonus benefit payments. Hoover evicted them; two were killed.

Secretary of War, Patrick J. Hurley calls upon Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to use troops to clear out the veterans. MacArthur & his aide, Dwight D. Eisenhower set about to business ... [1]

Patrick Hurley shows up again in the 1950s when he runs for the U.S. Senate against Dennis Chavez. See Harry Truman Administration for more on this.

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State under Hoover, was Secretary of War in the FDR Administration. Later, as Secretary of State under Truman, he made the following post-Hiroshima proposal on Sept. 11, 1945:

... he proposes that the United States immediately share the secrets of the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union in order to head off an arms race "of a rather desparate character," as Stimson put it. "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life," Stimson said, anticipating his critics, ''is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him." [7]

Ironically, the Henry L. Stimson Center, a national security think tank, is now a breeding ground for PNAC enthusiasts.

James Carrol, author of the above passage, calls Stimson's proposal the 'great American road not taken.' Similar proposals were independently made in 1946 by Lewis Mumford and J. Oppenheimer [6].

The period between 1946 and 1949 is very similar to the present period, despite PNAC claims to the contrary:

The 'defense' strategy outlined in PNAC is founded on the post cold-war assumption that as the single remaining super-power the U.S. must do whatever is militarily necessary to prevent other, 'lesser' powers from obtaining nuclear capabilities.

This position, which the U.S. now presumably finds itself in as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union, is a unique position according to PNAC - one that demands a unique defense strategy. But is it really so unique? Is it not like the position the U.S. was in over 50 years ago, at the end of World War II?

At that time, the U.S. had emerged from the war as the dominant international power. It alone had nuclear capabilities, which it utilized in the war (the 20 kiloton Little Boy uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 8, 1945, killing 80,000, and the 22 kiloton Fat Man plutonium bomb that killed 70,000 on August 9th.) The cold-war with the Soviet Union, which eventually turned into a nuclear stand-off, had not yet begun. For Russia's first succesful test of an A-bomb would not happen until July 14, 1949. [8].

On the fiscal irresponsibility of Hoover and George W. Bush:

• "[George Bush has presided over] a two-year binge of tax cuts [and] a rocketing federal deficit and job losses that recall the Herbert Hoover era..." [9]
• "[George W. Bush's] tenure is shaping up to be a combination of a couple of quagmires: Lyndon Jonson 1968 and Herbert Hoover 1932." [10]
• "Mr. Bush was the most fiscally irresponsible president since Herbert Hoover."[11]
• "With more than two million jobs having disappeared since Mr. Bush took office in January 2001, he finds himself in danger of becoming the first president since Hoover to oversee a decline in the country's employment."[12]