Lilienthal's Record
Rollins, Alfred B. Jr.
Lilienthal's Record The Journals of David E. Lilienthal. Volume I, the t.v.a. years, 1939-1941, and Volume II, the atomic energy years, 1945-1950. Harper & Row. 1400 pp....
...He appears here as a man who built mightily and well, and was rewarded largely with resistance and low pay...
...Reviewed by Alfred B. Rollins, Jr...
...they probe his inadequacies, uncertainties, and discouragements...
...He was rough on himself...
...With Lilienthal the non-professional reader comes closer to the dilemmas and delusions of policy making and the frustrations of official life than he is likely to be able to do again for many a year...
...And he was rough on others...
...He called the strikes on Bernard Ba-ruch without mumbling...
...Perhaps the most striking fact about these Journals is the breadth of the concerns they record...
...He has, of course, come down from Olympus...
...They reveal the man's spontaneous reactions to all kinds of things, personal as well as public...
...In these entries, he let himself go with frank enjoyment of victory and honors...
...The Journals are the first two volumes of the deeply reflective personal diary which Lilienthal has kept since college days...
...Liberals will be particularly fascinated because this is the story of what it is like to be a committed liberal in a seat of power, of what it is like to build a TV A and to have to defend it endlessly against the wrecking crews, of what it is like for a sensitive man to build the bombs, for a liberal to live with the "Top Secret" stamp and the security check, of what it is like, at last, to lose the biggest fight—against the H Bomb...
...More important, the Journals are a profound study of the response of a dignified, confident, humble man to the relentless pressures of great challenge and petty interference...
...This is, of course, a partisan document...
...But what of the man so courageously revealed...
...teaches American history at Harpur College...
...It is one of the most valuable historical documents of the century...
...ALFRED B. ROLLINS, JR...
...Lilienthal used his Journals for self-exploration...
...WILLIAM McCANN reports regularly in these pages on significant paperbacks...
...Intimately and frankly, it is one man's view...
...And he confessed his errors...
...They are all the more useful because, as Lilienthal returns again and again to the same personalities in different contexts, one gets many different impressions, not always consistent, but always searching and well worth reading...
...Yet the chief value of the Journals is not their fascinating revelation of the man and his associates, but the immense amount of hard information they contain...
...No man in American public life has combined so successfully the tough, skilled operations of a master-administrator with the clear-eyed idealism which shone in every line of Lilienthal's spontaneous statement of faith, This I Do Believe...
...He savored almost adolescently the success of his bon mots, the exhilaration of holding an audience in his hands...
...Here we find Lilienthal glowing with pride that he could be mistaken for his teen-age daughter's boyTHE REVIEWERS HORACE M. GRAY is a professor of economics at the University of Illinois...
...But Lilienthal became almost too much an Olympian...
...WILLIAM L. NEUMANN is a professor of history at Goucher College...
...He recorded faithfully his caustic contempt for Senator Kenneth McKellar...
...David Lilienthal has been one of the great figures of the New Deal Olympus...
...Now it is a genuinely exciting surprise that he has chosen to reveal the intimate record of his own intellectual struggles, his personal prides and misgivings, his feelings and fears as a man, a father, and a maker of great affairs...
...A paperback edition of his book, "America Encounters Japan," will be published in the fall...
...friend, exuberant over horseback riding and gardening, deep in despair amidst the interminable Congressional hearings, angry to the point of violence when small men presume to topple large matters carelessly, fretting in his Washington office over the financial insecurity he has wished on his family, sobbing suddenly and uncontrollably as he works over the third draft . of his resignation from the Atomic Energy Commission, or suddenly overcome with laughter as he finds himself in pajamas at six o'clock in the morning bailing water from a porch roof with a dipper...
...He appears here chiefly as a man of great integrity, whose liberal faith could not be corroded by twenty years of struggle, mud, and cynical assault...
...BART BERNSTEIN teaches American history at Bennington College...
...Although the entries were kept irregularly and are extremely thin for the crucial first six years of the Tennessee Valley Authority, they are astonishingly thorough in their coverage of the issues, conflicts, and policies of the period following 1939...
...And Lilienthal helps the reader penetrate more closely to the heart of atomic energy decision-making than perhaps anyone else will ever be able to do...
...This is fascinating and exciting reading...
...As an "inside" document of day-to-day events, they go closer to the heart of TVA's political and administrative history than any other current source does...
...Lilienthal was fascinated by people, and his hundreds of quick profiles of associates and enemies probe directly to the heart and the motive...
...He wrote "Roosevelt and Howe...
...He has contributed to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists...
...Historians have here records of literally hundreds of significant conferences, telephone calls, and conversations which otherwise would have been lost—talks with Presidents and generals, Congressmen and AEC commissioners, business leaders and labor leaders, and many others...
...He appears here as a real human being, remarkably sensitive, complex, and able, but a man who could, on occasion, be proud, or naive, or even self-righteous...
...He co-edited, with John Somer-ville, the original paperback anthology, "Social and Political Philosophy...
...RONALD E. SANTONI teaches philosophy at Wabash College...
Vol. 29 • April 1965 • No. 4
