Living in Iowa, I feel a kind of obligation to say something nice about the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. But it may surprise you to know that it is not hard to do, because the site is one of those places that taught me a little about something I only thought I understood.

When I was a kid, hearing the name of Hoover was like summoning the avatar of woe. To my family – scratching its way to middle class respectability out of the fields of Oklahoma and Missouri – he was The Depression President, the guy whose only important function was to step aside for the amazing Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Later I suspected that image had to be a gross simplification, but honestly I never had the inclination to check it out. 

Then I moved about an hour north of Hoover’s birthplace and decided to take a look.

It’s a pleasant place and seemed to produce a pleasant man. I won’t say a small man, however, though the cottage he was born in is about the smallest abode I have ever set foot in. Few college apartments are this cramped, and when you realize that he lived here with a family of five, it’s all the more remarkable.

A stroll up and down the shaded, boarded sidewalks takes you past various Victorian-era homes (all palaces compared to Hoover’s place) and down to the edge of the well-preserved main street of West Branch, IA. The neighborhood is what you might imagine for the hometown of the first president born west of the Mississippi River: simple, industrious, dappled. But head the other direction and you’ll reach the presidential library, which is where you’ll discover how far Hoover traveled from Iowa – and long before he ever came to the White House.

At the museum you’ll see an image that shows Hoover transported from dappled to dapper, turned out in a top hat and curled moustache, and quite the turn-of-the-century dandy. Then it’s Hoover in Australia, Hoover in China, Hoover in Europe and, finally, the World. By the time of the Great War he is rich, famous and magnanimous, one of the great philanthropists. Thousands of people in Europe are alive today because Hoover helped feed their starving grand-parents.

It’s easy to see how within 10 years of the war he would be elected president almost by acclamation, and easy to see too that carrying such high expectations, a fall was coming. A self-starter who actually succeeded, Hoover was ill-prepared for an economic collapse that tested many of his assumptions about hard work. He became one of those leaders about whom others said, “He just didn’t get it.”

It’s sad, really. If he’d only remained the gentleman of the world, he might be remembered more fondly. But then again, he might not be remembered at all. His presidency both sealed his fate and ensured that, for those willing to take a look, he remains an object lesson in how leadership tests us in ways we can never expect.

Hoover lived some 30 years past his presidency, but never again in Iowa. Only on his death and at his request was he returned home, to be buried on the hillside outside the library and to later be joined there by his wife. It’s a good spot to sit and think about fame, trouble and the world, until you find yourself listening instead to the wind in the nearby prairie grass, and a rustle like a curtain closing.