WELLS AND HOOVER

Southland Times, Issue 22508, 16 February 1935, Page 11

WELLS AND HOOVER

A passage in Mr H. G. Wells’s autobiography, in which he describes a visit he paid to Mr Hoover as a “sort of intrusion upon a sickly, overworked and overwhelmed man, a month behind in all his engagements and hopeless of ever overtaking them,” has brought an angry retort from Mr Lawrence Richey, secretary to Mr Hoover when the latter was President.

Mr Richey says that he had charge of the arrangements for Mr Wells’s visit and that the latter’s “studied insult of Mr Hoover’s management of-the White House is particularly astonishing for the reason that Mr Wells was never inside the White House during the Hoover administration.”

In 1931, says Mr Richey, Mr Hoover declined to receive Mr Wells as a guest at the White House. Later, the official record shows, the British Embassy formally requested the State Department to permit Sir Ronald Lindsay. British Ambassador, to present Mr Wells, to President Hoover. With Sir Ronald, Mr Wells was received formally at the executive offices on October 28, 1931, and was with the President exactly two minutes. “It is on such a brief call that he bases his statement that President Hoover was *an overwhelmed man, a month behind with all his engagements.’ ”