Dreams and the Possible
BERLE, ADOLF A.
Dreams and the Possible THE JOURNALS OF DAVID E. LILIENTHAL Harper & Row. 1,600 pp. $10. Reviewed by ADOLF A. BERLE Author, "Power Without Property" Everything reckoned the United States owes as...
...The two things are distinctly different...
...It has brains and tolerance enough to accommodate them...
...Meanwhile, he was—is—an intensely tender, sentient human being, and his journals give full day-by-day detail...
...Either accomplishment would in itself have constituted a monumental career...
...We moved out of classic capitalist organization into a phase that is beyond socialism and beyond Marx...
...Also, if I may say so, peculiarly Franklin Roosevelt...
...Take as illustration his note: "One of the temptations of the expert organizer, the professional executive, is to confuse an organization chart and an organization...
...There are the presentations a public servant must make before Congressional committees, in speeches, in articles...
...On one occasion at a conference in the White House, the TVA and kindred experiments in the United States were violently attacked as being "socialist...
...For nearly seven years he was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission—today a pulsating engine steadily drawing the United States into a new and uncharted phase of technical development...
...Between 1933-50 the United States skipped a phase through which most other countries have had to pass...
...Political action, technical development, empirical tackling of problems of production and social development have jelled into an operational American system of remarkable strength...
...There was the job...
...Neither life nor history is a series of great events...
...There are the endless conferences on organization— in Washington, in the field, on the airplane...
...Later, giving the Stafford Little lectures at Princeton, Lilienthal developed a notable point: Great, sweeping and ideal solutions of vast problems don't come off...
...Or as chronicle of a phase in history the importance of which appears greater as the years go by...
...Now democratic social evolution is peculiarly Lilienthal...
...Actually the world has looked down the gun-barrels of mass destruction during substantial parts of its history—at the time, for example, of the black plague in Europe—and such periods were nevertheless productive...
...Centuries from now historians will find in these journals a light on the American 20th-century Renaissance as vivid as is found in the biographies of the Italian Renaissance...
...life works this way...
...For him, the art of the possible did not exclude dreams...
...Beyond their value as case history and as political history, I think the volumes reveal the evolution of our society...
...Or as a text for public administration of the first order...
...Then he was shifted to atomic problems...
...There is the ever-present intrigue for power in Washington...
...Precisely for that reason these journals are more than a source of history, though they are certainly that...
...He needed no faith that world government could swiftly be created to commence dealing with the dangers of atomic destruction...
...They also are a text which ought to be read by every man taking a major job in government or industry...
...For this reason perhaps, Lilienthal was neither hypnotized nor panicked by the problem of atomic power, or by its capacity to destroy the world...
...The destructive revolutionary phase, which has handicapped the Soviet Union and China and has shaken much of the rest of the world, has little parallel in 20th-century United States...
...Collapse and revolution won't come from Washington, where there isn't anything real or substantative at any time...
...He made no attempt to separate those matters which he believed "belonged to history" from the personal impressions and happenings forming the fabric of personal life...
...Reviewed by ADOLF A. BERLE Author, "Power Without Property" Everything reckoned the United States owes as much to David Lilienthal as to any public servant in this generation below the rank of Franklin Roosevelt...
...President Roosevelt exploded to me, "Why do we have to be 'socialist' or 'capitalist?' The United States is a big enough country to have several systems going at once...
...He, with Senator Norris, dreamed of the possibility of the Tennessee Valley realization long before feasibility could be forecast...
...This is not to intimate that American development has been idyllic, perfect, or Utopian...
...I dropped in a moment later...
...By this quiet practice of dealing with the possible, Lilienthal built the two great organizations with which his name will always be associated...
...He was the drafter of the Acheson-Lilienthal report, and later of an early outline of the Atomic Energy Commission work now in progress...
...For, as he says, this is the way it happened...
...This was intentional...
...To me they are also the kindly and beautiful record of the life of a friend of many years...
...We don't have to force everything into some doctrinaire model.' He was referring to Lilienthal's step-by-step approach to development of the Tennessee Valley experiment...
...He did see that immediate jobs could be taken care of, and that more could be taken on as small achievements laid the base for large ones...
...It does suggest that the American method of democratic evolution—presently directed by President Johnson toward abolition of poverty-has greater potential than the stupendous and cataclysmic attempts to create new systems...
...That is where the work is done, and their ability to carry on must be strengthened...
...And there are the personal problems: how to keep home life intact and see the children through adolescence...
...He carried this conviction into his work as well as his diaries...
...In net results, the United States has done more for more of its people than any great nation in the world...
...Combined, they present an almost unrivaled picture of achievement...
...Anything but...
...Smaller, immediate problems are met as they come up...
...Here are his journals...
...History, Lilienthal thinks, is made by men, and personality is essential to the process...
...The reader may take these volumes as human interest-they are poignant and delightful...
...He needed no vast socialist theory as basis for the TVA outline...
...Between 1935-45 his patient, untiring industry and dedication— illuminated by a quietly unobtrusive genius—created the vast productive agency we know today as the TVA...
...The interplay of human personalities will write its own story...
...There are low points when the game's results seem hardly worth the candle of weariness, frustration and exhaustion...
...The aggregate of these smaller solutions determines the great result...
...Or, again, his persistent belief that whatever Washington does, people will still live in towns and cities...
...There was the political position—and opposition...
...the troubles occur out in the communities...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 3
