He Didn't Sell out
Rollins, A. B. Jr.
He Didn't Sell Out Reviewed by A. B. Rollins Jr. Tn 1950, David E. Lilienthal resigned the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission. It was the end of a great career in public pioneering....
...Whatever one's judgment of Lilien-thal's adjustment, it must be agreed that the new third volume of his Journals, like its predecessors, is a distinguished document, frank and full of the stuff from which judgments can be made...
...He did have moments of uncertainty, but it should be no great surprise that he adjusted easily to the world of private business...
...this was less the development of a new career than the transfer of his old skills and atti-' tudes to a new arena...
...Here we have the author's own grim post-election prophecy of 1950: "Whatever chance we have to get out of the Far East in a reasonable time may be gone...
...The point is that Lilienthal had never been doctrinaire as a New Dealer, had always been a liberal with a central belief in human freedom and a large concern for private property...
...For some old friends it seemed that Lilienthal had sold out...
...He Didn't Sell Out Reviewed by A. B. Rollins Jr...
...Sometimes both the news and the views are appalling, even in retrospect...
...For nineteen years, in the state of Wisconsin, at the Tennessee Valley Authority, and at AEC, he had specialized in the kind of imaginative administration that creates new life from the dry texts of statutes...
...But to be shocked by the new Lilienthal, or in fact to see a new one at all, one must have misunderstood quite badly the old, original, and I think only, David Lilienthal...
...His liberalism had been certified everywhere by accomplishment...
...But he insisted upon earning his money with dignity and in the face of an interesting challenge...
...Here, for example, is a fresh account of the "hysteria all around" in Manhattan as the Korean War broke out...
...But the Journals continue to be an interesting document because the man himself is interesting, and the whole man is here, his love of the soil and of children, his almost boyish pleasure at his contacts with great people and at being himself recognized on the street or in an elevator, his crisp ideas and deep emotions...
...And there is genuine humor...
...It provides the fresh, immediate impressions and comments of a man who, among other things, has made himself one of the greatest diarists of our day...
...The gaps between entries are sometimes long...
...And for liberals who themselves fought through the battles of the Fifties, it may also be a tool with which to sharpen their own self-perception...
...The tone of the Journals remains generally tough, honest, squaring with the integrity of the man who wrote it...
...There are problems...
...This Journal will be endlessly useful for the light it throws upon the work of scores of his associates...
...A distinguished and pathetic financier sought advice on a country refuge—safe from the Bomb but within commuting distance of Wall Street...
...The needs of the Carrier Corporation or RCA or Lazard Freres for clean, tough, operational advice were not so very different from those of TVA or AEC...
...It will become a significant source in the study of modern business, the foreign aid programs, and several other matters...
...Yet, when Lilienthal left the AEC, it was for Wall Street and Sutton Place, for new and close associations with Lazard Freres and with men like Cloud Wampler of the Carrier Corporation and David Sarnoff of RCA...
...To doctrinaire New Dealers, the proof appeared clear in his book, Big Business: A New Era, where he argued passionately the central mission of Bigness in the modern world...
...He wanted, quite frankly, to make money after a lifetime of doing multi-million-dollar jobs for a bureaucrat's salary...
...Unlike many liberals who lose interest just as victory becomes operational, Lilienthal was preoccupied with the realities of doing, not the whimsies of planning...
...But certainly its chief interest lies in its revelations of a significant man and his views...
...It will fill many gaps with its record of otherwise unnoted incidents...
...At moments one has the feeling that Lilienthal is aware of posterity reading over his shoulder as he writes, something which did not come through in the earlier volumes...
...But this is the stuff of history, not the final synthesis...
...Some executives threatened to move their offices out of town...
...It is clearly one of the significant documents of the generation...
...On the positive side, one must also remember that he had always been chiefly a planner and manager of great projects...
...And even the conflicts of public and private interests sometimes seemed less in Manhattan and Los Angeles than they had been in Kenneth McKellar's Tennessee, or in the Washington of Brien McMa-hon and Bernard Baruch...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
