To Luther Gulick, he was simply and affectionately “Chief” — long before Herbert Hoover became the 31st President. The two had met around 1915 when Luther was a young graduate student of government at Columbia University and Hoover was leading President Wilson’s wartime Food Administration. Gulick was soon to enter government service himself, as a military statistician.

We learned more about their friendship from an extraordinary trove of family letters given us by Gulick’s nephew Denny, who recently visited the Archives with Gulick’s grandaughters Leslie and Lisa, children of Gulick’s son Luther Jr.

We see, for example, that Gulick and his wife, Helen, socialized with Hoover in his apartment in the Waldorf Astoria in 1963, celebrating publication of Hoover’s whimsical book on fly fishing.

https://www.amazon.com/Fishing-Fun-Wash-Your-Soul/dp/B0006AYN8E

Hoover, who sat on Gulick’s board at the Institute of Public Administration, reminisced about his dashing exploits in fin de siecle China, Russia and Egypt and shared his assessments of leaders from Wilson to Harry Truman. You can read Gulick’s full account here:

We’ll be posting much more from the letters — and many others already in our files — in days and weeks ahead.