Covering an eventful period in Herbert Hoover’s career—and, more specifically, his life as a political pugilist from 1933 to 1955—this previously unknown memoir was composed and revised by the 31st president during the 1940s and 1950s—and then, surprisingly, set aside. This work recounts Hoover’s family life after March 4, 1933, his myriad philanthropic interests, and, most of all, his unrelenting “crusade against collectivism” in American life. Aside from its often feisty account of Hoover’s political activities during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, and its window on Hoover’s private life and campaigns for good causes, The Crusade Years invites readers to reflect on the factors that made his extraordinarily fruitful postpresidential years possible. The pages of this memoir recount the story of Hoover’s later life, his abiding political philosophy, and his vision of the nation that gave him the opportunity for service. This is, in short, a remarkable saga told in the former president’s own words and in his own way that will appeal as much to professional historians and political scientists as it will lay readers interested in history.

George H. Nash is a historian, a lecturer, and an expert on the life of Herbert Hoover. He is the author of a three-volume scholarly biography of Hoover and the monograph Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, as well as of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, Freedom Betrayed, and Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism. The 2008 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters, he lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts.