Show diary doesn doean t have to tell earthshaking earth shaking occurrences by tvs analyst and commentator washington the nation and particularly the nations nation S capital where we are highly national and international conscious is suffering as never before from the result of memories good and bad the roosevelt epoch produced a rash of reminiscences books about 32 of them just since his death currently we have with us the churchill Church dl war memoirs as th they ey are called although when I 1 was young and read the memoirs of sherlock holmes I 1 thought a memoir was something printed after a man is dea death th of course sherlock came back so I 1 suppose that legitimizes the winston churchill was a great lary keeper as was his fellow gountryman soun ot tryman ryman samuel whose stutt stuff was so hot that the british government still chasn t released all ol 01 it frank lin roosevelt never kept a diary his sec see detary e t a r ot of the treasury m made ad e up for this lack henry morgen thau assembled volumes of about pages ach tach totaling about 80 million words the task must have kept bree stenographers a day working ta relays he had the d anes aries bound lome some said at government expense although I 1 daresay he paid tor for it in the aie end ills ms was a lazy method lie ile didn dian t have to depend on his memory lie he had a la in his off otince ice and every word spoken in the supposed sanctity of his chamber in the treasury overlooking the wide sweep of lawn and park that flows down to the potomac was duly tran scribed when the news of this epic epla achievement became public a terrible howl resulted and some of the volumes were returned to the government archives what a man I 1 wonder it if d ary keepers are I 1 would hate to admit to a psychologist that I 1 have kept a flary tor for years even decades I 1 still keep one I 1 don t know how long ago I 1 started but I 1 still have me one slim green volume dated 1904 in ba my possession the year 1904 that was just 15 years after another not in my diary but in my tather father s d ary keeping Is congem congeni tal which stated line fine boy arrived IP p in m I 1 may say the ane t ne Is the natural exaggeration of a proud parent who didn dian t know what he was in tor for at any rate it if diary keeping Is ased against me I 1 have two outs hardly anything even ot of mild in terest lerest is or will be recorded on the laded pages ot of my journals and secondly because I 1 write such a rile hand that I 1 can decipher only i is few lines here and there myself my mother should have most ot of be blame tor for my bad handwriting just as she Is to blame for the tact fact that I 1 can write at all she was a writer and unique as it was in those good old days she possessed a typewriter a stubby little affair affectionately known is the buck blick of course it was quite improper to expose a child of preschool pre school age to a typewriter it was not my mother mothers s fault back in the some of us t vaccinate vac cinat ed tor for anything but smallpox I 1 was too young to understand that at the time and since typewriters were as rare as porcelain hath bath tubs in a city of 20 who could guess their evil influence I 1 sup pose I 1 t to accuse my parents because I 1 became thorough ly inured to the use of the type writer long before I 1 could balance a pencil and this fact did my handwriting no good at that time what was called Spen cenan still was taught in the schools of new york state but very few mastered it even without the curlicues and shading of earlier flays days and just as I 1 was getting to 80 I 1 could make the wobbly M a s and the terrible q a along came a new pharoah to my scholastic egypt and introduced the verti cal system that was probably where my une ducat on really began I 1 unlearned the Spen cerlan all eight right but I 1 was never able to go vertical nothing important Is ever entered but to get back to diary keeping it at least my diary keeping the illegibility of the entries in my diaries isn t really as important as the unimportance of their contents let me illustrate from one with which I 1 have a worn wom leather cover at eit hand it is dated 1914 a good year tor for a diary but a bad diary tor for the world the record of war days should have been chronicled dramatically as the beginning of the end of an epoch an epoch which breathed its last in the midst of another war but did my record do that lets look at june 29 1914 A s wr 4 do we find the entry YESTER DAY FERDINAND WAS assassinated AT VO we do not we find this juin juns 29 gundl S pierre S paul bought berlitz greek austern bey the book vas purchased in paris were the year s record began the entry was made in washington while the ancient throne of haps burg was receiving the blood bath that was to sweep a half dozen rulers into oblivion I 1 was buying a beratz beri tz textbook for the purpose of studying some foreign language I 1 have no idea which one except that it was one I 1 never learned rustem bey I 1 remember was the turkish ambassador whom I 1 had to interview in all justice it may not be en the fault of my diary mak ing that I 1 didn dian t record the assas ansas susa si nation tion of the archduke nobody in america took the tragedy very seriously at that time few amer leans expected much else from europe s royal families but assassinations sassi nations or less respectable peccadilloes dillos I 1 ought to have known better than that since I 1 had been helping cover the french foreign off ce tor for the two years pieced ng but I 1 had been drenched with war talk over there and had shaken it off when I 1 returned europe almost imme d abely shrank into a dreamy do man ma n of picture book memory with no connection whatever with my work a day world later on to be sure there is evi dence that I 1 on second thought felt I 1 haan hadn t done my diary justice insofar as ferd nand was con berned but I 1 always was feeling that way about my diary and never doing anything about it this as I 1 said keeps my diaries from having the sl value other than to exude a somewhat conscious stricken odor and re mind me that the good young days were no better than those bad old ones insofar as my habits and con duct were concerned for an honest diary certainly has to be well ed t ed to conceal one is true character you note in its pages some high resolve or noble undertaking which was more important to you at the moment of recording than the open ing of the panama canal or the re suit of a presidential election in a short year you read it over and are utterly unable to recall the slightest thing about the events chronicled sometimes my old diaries even though they record no event of great historical significance sound quite timely for example on oc tober 3 1914 I 1 not much doing I 1 don t seem to be able to save my money 1 october 8 the belgian secretary appears we consume quantities ot of beer and tells me his life story a bore but business I 1 just the weary routine of the hard bard working reporter fortunately my space is running out noth ng is more interesting to write or read about than oneself nothing is less interesting to anyone else but I 1 wish to prove my point namely that no matter how imbor tant diary keeping may have been tor for the Chur chills the marco or the and perhaps therefore as harmful as important mine was neither and I 1 marvel that any news man press or radio who lives in the midst of alarms who was there when most things happened and told all in breathless detail via the copydesk copy desk or micro phone to millions of wide eyed readers or listeners would ever think of writing it down after ward note for instance a a recent diary entry tor for june 5 1947 which a brittle clipping of even date de dares clares not only vibrantly but with perfect inexactitude may go down in history as the day of the begin ning of the real peace after world war II 11 lest you have forgotten that was the day secretary of stae george C marshall proposed at harvard university a new approach to european rehabilitation which later became the marshall bla plan then E R P and finally the e eco ca cooperation admin note my diary for that date A meeting of the association of radio news analysts kalten born to dinner |