Books: The Sweet Draught of Power

THE JOURNALS OF DAVID E. LILIENTHAL. 1,400 pages. Harper & Row. $20.

For 17 years, through Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal.

David Lilienthal rode the seas of controversy and survived. Perhaps he succeeded because he was a supremely practical administrator concerned with getting a job done, attentive to down-to-earth detail, indifferent to dogma. “The short and sure road to despair and surrender is this,” he wrote, “to believe that there is, somewhere, a scheme of things that will eliminate conflict, struggle, stupidity, cupidity, personal jealousy. The idea of Utopia is mischievous. as well as unrealistic. And dull, to boot. Man is bom pushing and shoving as the sparks fly upward.”

These diaries, covering Lilienthal’s years as a director off the Tennessee Valley Authority, then as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, are a day-by-day tale of pushing and shoving. Lilienthal was only 34, with a reputation as a labor-law expert and a job on Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission, when Franklin Roosevelt tapped him in 1933 for the TVA. The most energetic of the authority’s three directors, Lilienthal pushed TVA into public power, running afoul of private-utility magnates, notably Wendell Willkie, then president of Commonwealth & Southern. Bold and confident, Lilienthal was capable of shrewd self-appraisal. “Mentally on the quick side, resourceful; ingenious, particularly in discussion and strategy development,” he wrote of himself. “But not profound, nor capable of understanding subtle psychological analysis. Impatient. Not a natural mixer.”

Palace Politics. While Lilienthal’s fight with the power companies won the headlines, he had just as much trouble protecting his flanks against marauding New Dealers. Harold Ickes wanted to tuck TVA into the Interior Department. Other New Dealers favored in creasing centralization in Washington, but Lilienthal believed in decentralization, and worked incessantly to keep TVA free of politics or pressure groups.

When he refused to hand out TVA patronage jobs to politicians or consult them on policy, he made an enemy of Tennessee’s terrible-tempered Senator Kenneth McKellar. Haling Lilienthal before Congress as often as possible, McKellar drubbed him unmercifully. Lilienthal usually managed to keep his temper, though once he bearded McKellar after a hearing: “Senator, you are an old man and probably haven’t much time to live. You are doing a fellow human being an injustice in your position toward me. You don’t want to carry that on your soul when it comes your time to go.” McKellar shouted. “God damn, God damn, I have had enough of this!” Then he stomped off.

Under the barrage of abuse, Lilienthal was often tempted to quit. But he had second thoughts, as he noted candidly. “Though I don’t think I am pathologically vain, there is a thrill in being a celebrity and in the kudos that go with that state. Playing the great man—it is a sweet draught and no mistake.”

Overboard on Security. President Truman appointed Lilienthal head of the newly created AEC in 1946. From then on Lilienthal’s diary entries become less exuberant; he had fewer triumphs and many more frustrations. After a brutal fight for Senate confirmation, thanks to McKellar’s opposition, Lilienthal had great hopes of creating peaceful uses for atomic energy, but he immediately bogged down in security questions in a Washington that was nervous about atomic secrecy. Lilienthal had to take atomic-production figures to Truman on tiny slips of paper with garbled figures that only he could read, and even then Defense Secretary Louis Johnson cautioned him in the President’s office:

“Don’t read the figures out loud.”

When Congress’ Joint Committee on Atomic Energy became “scared and ugly” in 1949 over the publicity given the disappearance of a bottle of uranium at the Argonne laboratory in Chicago, Lilienthal tried to talk sense to them: “Criticize the commission if you wish, but don’t induce hysteria in this country. This is not bomb material, and you should not say it is. If the people find that Congress is rattled over a seventh of an ounce of uranium oxide, what can we expect when Russia has a stockpile of atomic weapons?”

Not Very Hopeful. Though Truman staunchly backed him up in his battles with Congress, Lilienthal decided to resign in 1950. His last important act in office was to oppose the crash program to build the hydrogen bomb. Along with most of the members of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, including Robert Oppenheimer, James Conant, Lee DuBridge and Enrico Fermi, Lilienthal objected to the bomb because he felt that the U.S. was relying too heavily on nuclear weapons and massive retaliation. He was also hopeful (but not very) that some agreement could be made with Russia not to build it.

But the bomb’s proponents—AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Senator Brien MacMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy—carried the day with Truman, and the possibility of falling behind in the arms race was narrowly averted. In spite of his stand on the H-bomb, Lilienthal had no use for appeasement or unilateral disarmament. In answer to one proposal to surrender rather than use the bomb, Lilienthal commented: “It isn’t important how long one lives; what is important is that while he lives, he lives as a man.”