Now more than five decades old, Herbert Hoover's 1959 statement
to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University on the purpose
and scope of the Hoover Institution continues to guide and
define its mission in the twenty-first century: "This
Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its
Bill of Rights and its method of representative government. Both
our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise
from which springs initiative and ingenuity.... Ours is a system
where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental,
social or economic action, except where local government, or the
people, cannot undertake it for themselves.... The overall
mission of this Institution is, from its records, to recall the
voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study
of these records and their publication, to recall man's
endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America
the safeguards of the American way of life. This Institution is
not, and must not be, a me