Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Hoover Institution was founded in June 1919 by Herbert Hoover, then a wealthy engineer and one of Stanford University's first graduates. He sent a telegram to Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur offering $50,000 to collect primary materials related to World War I, creating what became known as the Hoover War Collection.
In 1959, Herbert Hoover described the institution's mission as recalling "the voice of experience against the making of war" and sustaining "the safeguards of the American way of life." He also stated that the institution's purpose was to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx, including Communism, Socialism, economic materialism, and atheism.
The Hoover Tower is a 285-foot structure on the Stanford University campus built to permanently house the institution's archival collections. It was completed in 1941, the year of Stanford's golden jubilee. The university allocated $600,000 for its construction after the collection outgrew the Stanford Library.
Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Thomas Sargent all held senior fellowships. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became the institution's director in 2020. Other prominent fellows include economist Thomas Sowell, historian Niall Ferguson, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and honorary fellows Friedrich Hayek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Thatcher.
The Hoover Institution receives nearly half of its funding from private gifts, primarily individual contributions, and the other half from its endowment. Named funders include the Taube Family Foundation, the Koret Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the William E. Simon Foundation.
As of 2017, the Hoover Institution has as many as 200 resident scholars, known as fellows, at any given time. Fellowship appointments do not require approval from Stanford tenure committees. Fellows are an interdisciplinary group covering political science, economics, education, foreign policy, law, national security, history, health, and energy.