After Pepys

Some of the early New Dealers made names for themselves. Henry Morgenthau Jr. made notes. When at last he was eased out of the Treasury in July, 1945, he took his candid diary with him--all 250,000 pages of it.

Many another man in public life had saved scraps of paper as the basis for memoirs. But never had such a man squirreled away so great a hoard of data against the long, cold winter of private life. By last week, 872 black-bound volumes, averaging 300 pages apiece, lined three walls of Morgenthau's Manhattan office. A stack of material still unbound would run the collection to 900 volumes. Even a cipher-happy New Dealer could only guess at the word count--perhaps 60,000,000.

Henry the Morgue had started his journalizing in a small way. At first he just kept copies of important letters, memoranda of meetings with the President, texts of his speeches. The whole year of 1934 took up only two volumes.

Gradually Morgenthau made the record more complete. He included photostats of thousands of letters, transcripts of press conferences, speech drafts with changes in the President's hand, recorded conversations of every official phone call. (Of telephone talks with the President, the Secretary recorded only his own side.) He either dictated, or wrote in his own barely legible hand, an account of Cabinet meetings and all his dealings with Roosevelt. Each war year takes 100 volumes or more.

Enough for All. Now gaunt, grey and ailing, Morgenthau has hired researchers to sift and summarize his giant diary. Last week one of them, Jonathan Grossman, a young (31) history instructor at New York's City College, gave the American Historical Association some revelations from the early years:

P: When the dollar price of gold was being forced up in 1933, the daily quotation was set by the President in a bedside conference with Morgenthau and RFChairman Jesse Jones; the figures were often arbitrary, and once the President agreed to a 21-c- boost because "it's a lucky number--it's three times seven."

P: When F.D.R. got ready to fire Dean Acheson, then Under Secretary of the Treasury and now Under Secretary of State, he called him "a lightweight." He always referred to Montagu Norman, bearded, longtime Governor of the Bank of England, as "Old Pink-Whiskers."

"On the whole," says Grossman, Morgenthau "emerges from the record as an excellent Secretary of the Treasury and Mr. Roosevelt emerges as a great President. But there is sufficient in the diary to lessen the reputation of many important men and to provide a field day for Mr. Roosevelt's bitter opponents."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.