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Show rp w.'"WUa.1 snwV.js.aisiWr"''wMS-0 "if.'3V V '- Diary Doesn't Have to Tell Earth-Shaking Occurrences By BAUKHAGE Newt Analyst and Commentator WASHINGTON. The nation, and particularly the nation' capital, where we are highly national and international-conscioui is suffering as never before from the result of memories, good an bad. The Roosevelt epoch produced a rash of reminiscences 20 books about FDR, 32 of them just since his death. Currently we have with us the Churchill war memoirs, as they ar called, although when I was young and read "The Memoirs of Sherloc Holmes," I thought a memoir was something printed after a man's deatt Of course Sherlock came back, so I suppose that legitimizes the term nology. Winston Churchill was a great diary-keeper, as was his fellow-countryman, fellow-countryman, Samuel Pepys, whose Do we find the entry: "YESTEB DAY ARCHDUKE FERDINAN1 WAS ASSASSINATED AT SARAJE VO?" We do not. We find this: Juin 29. Lundi S. Pierre, S. Paul Bought Berlitz Greek : 'M - wlA-va? ft' fi . stuff was so hot that the British government still h a s n't released all of it. Frank-lui Frank-lui Roosevelt never kept a diary. His sec-retary sec-retary of the treasury made up for this lack. Henry Morgen-thau Morgen-thau assembled 900 volumes of about 35fl nncrpc parfi. trv- Rustem Bey (The book was purchased in Paris, where the year's record began. The entry was made in Washington.) While the ancient throne of Hap: burg was receiving the blood bat that was to sweep a half doze rulers into oblivion I was buyin a Berlitz textbook for the purpos of studying some foreign languag I have no idea which one excef that it was one I never learnec taling about 80 million words. The task must have kept three stenographers a day working in relays. He had the diaries bound, some said at government expense, although I daresay he paid, for it in the end. His was a lazy method. He didn't have to depend on his memory. He had a dictograph in his office, 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 transcribed. tran-scribed. When the news of this epic achievement became public a terrible howl resulted and some of the volumes were returned to the government archives. What a man! I wonder if diary-keepers are normal. I would hate to admit to a psychologist that I have kept a diary for years, even decades. I still keep one. I don't know how long ago I started, but I still have one slim, green volume, dated 1904, in my possession. The year 1904 that was just 15 years after another entry, not in my diary, but in my father's (diary-keeping is congenital) congeni-tal) which stated "fine boy arrived 5 p. m." I may say the "fine" is the natural exaggeration of a proud parent who didn't know what he was in for. At any rate, if diary-keeping is used against me, I have two outs hardly anything, even of mild interest, in-terest, is or will be recorded on the faded pages of my journals, and secondly, because I write such a vile hand that I can decipher only a few lines here and there myself. My mother should have most of the blame for my bad handwriting, just as she is to blame for the fact that I can write at all. She was herself a writer and, unique as it was in those good old days, she possessed a typewriter, a stubby little affair, affectionately known Rustem Bey, I remember was th Turkish ambassador whom I had t interview. In all justice, it may not be entirely en-tirely the fault of my diary-making that I didn't record the assassination assas-sination of the archduke. Nobody in America took the tragedy very seriously. At that time few Americans Amer-icans expected much else from Europe's royal families but assassinations as-sassinations or less respectable peccadillos. I ought to have known better tha that since I had been helping cove the French foreign office for th two years preceding. But I ha been drenched with war talk ove there and had shaken it off whe I returned. Europe almost imms diately shrank into a dreamy dc main of picture-book memory wit no connection whatever with m; work-a-day world. Later on, to be sure, there is ev! dence that I, on second thought felt I hadn't done my diary justic insofar as Ferdinand was cor cerned. But I always was feelin that way about my diary and neve doing anything about it. This, as I said, keeps my diarie from having the slighest valu other than to exude a somewha conscious-stricken odor and r mind me that the good young day were no better than those bad ol ones insofar as my habits and cor duct were concerned, for an hones diary certainly has to be well edit ed to conceal one's true charactei You note in its pages some hig: resolve or noble undertaking whic. was more important to you at th moment of recording than the oper. ing of the Panama canal or the r( suit of a presidential election. 1 a short year you read it over an are utterly unable to recall th slightest thing about the event chronicled. Sometimes mv old diaries, eve Sometimes my old diaries, eve though they record no event e great historical significance, soun quite timely. For example on Oc tober 3, 1914: "Not much doing. I don't seem to be able to save my money." . . . October 8: "The Belgian secretary appears, we consume quantities of beer and tells me his life story a bore, but business.' (just the weary routine of the hard-working reporter) Fortunately my space is runnin out. Nothing is more interestin to write or read about than oneseL' Nothing is less interesting to anyon else. But I wish to prove my pour namely, that no matter how impo) taht diary-keeping may have bee for the Churchills, the Marco Pole or the Plutarchs, and perhap therefore as harmful as importan mine was neither. And I marvel that any newsman, news-man, press or radio, who lives in the midst of alarms, who "was there" when most things happened hap-pened and told all in breathless detail via the copy-desk or microphone micro-phone to millions of wide-eyed readers or listeners would evei think of writing it down afterward. after-ward. Note for instance a recent diai entry for June 5, 1947, which brittle clipping of even date d clares not only vibrantly but wit perfect inexactitude "may go dow in history as the day of the begil ning of the real peace after Worl War II." (Lest you have forgottei that was the day Secretary of Stat George C. Marshal proposed i Harvard university a new approac to " European rehabilitation whic later became the Marshal plai then E.R.P. and finally the ecc nomic cooperation administration. Note my diary for that date: "A meeting of the Associatior of Radio News Analysts. Kal'n born to dinner." as "the Blick." Of course it was quite improper to expose a child of pre-school age to a typewriter. It was not my mother's fault. Back in the '90s, some of us weren't vaccinated vaccinat-ed for anything but smallpox. I was too young to understand that at the time, and since typewriters were as rare as porcelain bathtubs bath-tubs in a city of 20,000, who could guess their evil influence? I suppose sup-pose I oughtn't to accuse my parents par-ents because I became thorough- ; ly inured to the use of the typewriter type-writer long before I could balance a pencil, and this fact did my handwriting no good. At that time what was called "Spencerian" still was taught in the schools of New York state, but very few mastered it even without the curlicues and shading of earlier days. And just as I was getting so I could make the wobbly "M's" and the terrible "q's", along came a new Pharoah to my scholastic Egypt and introduced the "vertical "verti-cal system." That was probably where my uneducation really began. I unlearned the Spencerian all right, but I was never able to go vertical. Nothing Important Is Ever Entered But to get back to diary-keeping, 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 a worn leather cover which I have at hand. It Is dated 1914, a good year for a diary, but a bad diary 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? Let's look at June 29, 1914. |