In these eight laconic sentences, composed some thirty years after the fact, Herbert Hoover summarized his part in an episode that involved him as director of the American Relief Administration activities in Eastern Europe after the First World War. However, Hoover's memoirs had much ground to cover regarding his busy career, and his account of this incident is considerably condensed, to say the least. In fact, the so-called Piñsk massacre of April 1919 was but one, albeit the most sensational, of numerous outrages reportedly inflicted upon Jews within Poland since the previous November, the month of the restoration of Polish statehood after more than a century of foreign rule. The accumulated charges convinced much of the world that the fledgling Polish government had encouraged or tolerated the slaughter and persecution of not fifty, but thousands of Jews, and the resultant wave of indignation in the United States and abroad persuaded the American authorities that they had no choice but to intervene in the controversy. These efforts culminated, as Hoover stated, in the dispatch of a board of inquiry led by Henry Morgenthau, but not all agreed that the mission had performed a “fine service” or even that it had reached coherent conclusions.