The unremarked phenomenon of Herbert Hoover is that he has been so long out of a regular job and has kept himself so busy. It is 19 years since he became, at 58, that white elephant of American politics, an ex-President (the only living one). Most recently he has been living and working in the tower of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, mainly putting together the notes which he has jotted down during ocean voyages and waits in railway and air terminals. The notes are his recollections of 70-odd years--his memoirs, his convictions and his self-vindication. He has finished three volumes and has started a fourth. He writes in pencil, doing a good deal of crossing out and writing over, sitting at a large desk from which, by stretching, he can look down 31 stories on the disordered world.

Hoover's basic convictions have not changed, although they have suffered many interpretations. His enemies attach him as a hopeless reactionary. ("That old cuss word 'reactionary,' " he notes.) His friends see him as a last hope of sensible liberalism. He is a large, whitehaired man, who appears to be a little disconsolate in the company of strangers. His voice is low and husky, and as he talks, he abstractly fingers a couple of worn coins. As on an old coin, the familiar face has grown a little indistinct. Heavily framed spectacles sometimes slip down to the end of the short nose; around the turned-down mouth, the once plump bull-terrier cheeks now sag mastiff-like.

Hoover is an orderly man. At the bottom of him is his Quakerism. Not all reformers look like Mahatma Gandhi. Some reformers, of a statistical turn of mind, look like Herbert Hoover. The Indian and the engineer once met. Hoover was pleased to discover that each carried the same make of cheap watch (Gandhi's was pinned to his loincloth). "A mark of our common humility," said Hoover. The urge to straighten things out, shared by Gandhi, is what has kept Hoover so busily at work.

In the past 16 years, the ex-president has delivered more than 50 carefully considered, formal lectures to his fellow countrymen. But he has not limited himself to exhortation. He has thrown himself into many worthy projects: into programs of relief for the hungry; into studies of such topics as revolution, war & peace, and the chaos in the executive departments of the U.S. Government (from this last, he produced the monumental Hoover Commission Report); into organizations like the Boys' Clubs and the Salvation Army, in which he takes his participation very seriously. A friend remembers him, travelling west by train one day, getting a wire from the Salvation Army which urged him to buy a doughnut in the Army's doughnut campaign. Hoover promptly wired back: "I will buy a doughnut."

He is not a complex character, but there is another Hoover--a man of deep personal attachments and sense of family, a quietly prideful grandfather, a gentle sentimentalist. Although it is a private matter which only his intimates know about, he has supported, sometimes for long periods, numerous college classmates, old associates and relatives down on their luck. One of the great facts of Hoover's life was his devotion to his wife, who died in 1944. To Lou Henry Hoover he has dedicated one room of the Hoover Library at Stanford University, and there he has assembled a small collection of the things which she once treasured: lace presented to her when he was working on Belgian relief, old Spanish silver, blue and white porcelain. In the dusty antique shops under Manhattan's Third Avenue El, Hoover is a familiar figure today, hunting around for more blue and white porcelain. He cherishes recollections of his Iowa boyhood which suggest some un-Hooverish pictures. "There was Cook's Hill," he writes from his notes. "That was a great long hill where on winter's nights we slid down at terrific pace with our tummies tight to homemade sleds."

Herbert Hoover, who made himself a successful mining engineer before he went into public life, is nowhere near being the extraordinarily wealthy man that he might have been if he had returned to his profession. He did not take any pay as Food Administrator, and as Secretary of Commerce and President he used his salary for charities and to pay for extra office personnel. He never discusses money (only world monetary situations).

Age does not trouble him. Like money, age is something he does not talk about. He is a robust man who gets along with little exercise outside of his fishing trips. He is still the simon-pure angler who never quite got over his horror that Calvin Coolidge fished with worms.

Occasionally he is plagued with wakefulness. Then he listens to the radio beside his bed. "I'm getting to be an expert on the Milkman's Matinee," he says. He grudgingly wears a hearing aid, bolts his food, and smokes recklessly. (He prefers his own brand of cigars, and when he is out to dinner and cigars are passed, politely takes one, pockets it, and cunningly extracts one of his own.) The man who upheld Prohibition as his stern executive duty now drinks two Martinis before dinner. He relaxes in the evening by preoccupiedly playing gin rummy or canasta with some of his group of loyal friends.

The Hoover inner circle, mostly old-guard Republicans, call him "the Chief" and surround him with veneration. Over powwows in his living room, the Chief presides with avuncular dignity. He does not monopolize the conversation but he dominates it, and when he speaks, no one interrupts him. No one slaps the Chief on the back, and no one tells him risque stories. The Chief's own humor is intellectual. He rarely laughs. He twinkles.

To his Waldorf suite comes a steady stream of callers, including Republican Congressmen and foreign officials. He spends part of every day with these visitors, assiduously pumping them. He is one of the best-informed private citizens in the U.S.

The suite is his haven and his watchtower. From the wall of the imposing living room, a portrait of Lou Henry Hoover gazes down on her husband's pipes, his blue and white porcelain and his solemn books. Three women secretaries wait on him. He seldom dictates answers to his mountainous correspondence, merely pencils a line across a letter which gives the cue as to what he wants the answer to be. He recently got a postcard which carried the arresting note: "Watch for a message which will change the face of the world." Hoover scribbled on it: "Watch for this."

WITH an economist, Dr. Arthur Kemp, he tracks down facts which will support his periodic lectures to the country. With such facts, as he interpreted them, he launched his speech last year on foreign policy, opening the Great Debate. This year he delivered the same exhortation again. One of the greatest dangers to free men everywhere, he says, is the overstraining of the U.S. economy. He begs for a reassessment of present U.S. policy in Europe. He raises instead the concept of a Gibraltar of freedom in the Western Hemisphere. He denies that this is "isolation"; the word is a "smear" used to squelch debate, he says. He deplores such cliches, "which freeze thought."

Hoover spent a few bitter and silent years after the country discarded him. Few people cared whether he had anything to say or not. Now a large number of people think he is right, so that even those who disagree with him listen to him with uneasy attention. He is an embarrassing old man who cannot be squelched. At 77, the Chief says invincibly: "They're not going to shut me up."

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