The Power of a Diary: Hollywood’s Political Savvy : Packwood: Long before this diary became potential dynamite, a William Powell movie depicted a senator with an equally incendiary book.

A diary is a nice thing to have, the senator believes--especially when you write in it every day, as he has been doing for years, faithfully. But if they push him too far, “I will feel compelled to push back,” he writes in one entry. “It is a good thing that I have kept such a complete record of certain events.” Long before he springs it on the party leaders, he knows what he’s got.

“It’s like owning a nice little atom bomb,” he tells one political boss. “Even if you never do anything with it, it’s a comfort just to know it’s there.” Up to now, they haven’t minded that he kept a diary. Better than getting into trouble. And a senator should have a hobby. That’s what they thought--if they thought about it at all--until someone asked him, condescendingly, what he put in his diary. His answer is a sobering one. “Everything,” he says. There is a pause. “Not . . . everything?” asks the party boss. “Yes, everything,” he confirms--nervous but triumphant. For he knows they will now have to give him what he wants.

This is from a funny but obscure movie, made in 1947, but with some striking parallels to recent news: Nunnally Johnson’s “The Senator Was Indiscreet,” with the incomparable William Powell as Sen. Melvin G. Ashton. Unlike Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), the diary-writing senator who just wants them to let him stay where he is, the movie’s senator wants them to make him President.

And if Ashton’s diary contains “everything,” Packwood’s contains--so he seems to be suggesting--just enough. As well as his written record of, as he says, “the hopes and the dreams and the despairs of all of us.” Ashton is less pretentious. And his “indiscretion” is nothing like those Packwood is charged with. The movie senator is a perfect gent--and happily married, as it turns out in the fade-out gag, to Myrna Loy.

Ashton first attracts attention by receiving a hired delegation (“What’s this guy running for?”) of cynical but obliging Native Americans in his hotel room, by speaking to them in what he regards as their native tongue, and by donning a war bonnet for photographers. Fred, his party boss (Ray Collins), is irate: “All Indian stuff with feather hats,” he says indignantly, is “strictly presidential stuff.” And Ashton knows this. “I’m not running for President,” insists the senator. “Then stop denying it!” says Fred.

But Ashton goes on denying it--wherever and whenever he can--mostly at the instigation of his campaign manager, an advertising fair-haired boy named Lew (Peter Lind Hayes). He can’t be President, insists the boss. Why not? “Because he’s an idiot.” Lew knows that, of course--but he believes you can sell the American people anything with the right campaign. And he seems to be doing it.

But the party bosses know an idiot when they see one--even if the voters don’t. And they won’t have any part of Ashton. At least until he springs the diary on them. And suddenly his campaign (he is called “the fighting non-candidate”) is in full swing.

Then the diary disappears, and panic takes over. Party leaders make a flurry of travel inquiries and reservations--and also meet with Ashton to persuade him to resign from the Senate. But he, like Packwood, wants to stay where he is--at least until “the boys,” as he calls them, “figure out some way for me to make a living.”

This is not easy. “Arncha even a lawyer?” asks one of the “boys,” disbelievingly. “Can you type?” asks another. “Not with both hands,” says Ashton. “What can you do!” demands the exasperated boss. The answer comes with a simple force: “Be a senator,” he replies, wistfully. “We don’t exactly aim to be subtle,” Johnson said to a reporter visiting the set during filming.

But they aimed at a nerve and they hit it. It’s not Preston Sturges, of course: It’s less a coherent sort of comedy than an extended comic sketch, with plenty of failed gags and feeble stretches. But it’s much worth seeing (it’s available on videotape), not just for the contemporary parallels but for its historic resonance.

The film was a daring project at the time, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on its way to Hollywood; when, as Johnson later said, “Everybody who didn’t wrap a flag around himself was a commie.” Johnson, who produced it, hired Charles MacArthur (who co-wrote “The Front Page” with Ben Hecht) to write the screenplay (which Johnson himself rewrote), and playwright George S. Kaufman to direct.

In spite of its ultimate box-office failure, Johnson remained proud--not so much because it was political as because it was funny. “People who like it,” he wrote to Kaufman in 1948, “are often fanatical about it. I find them quoting the jokes and describing the situations with such delight that it is impossible to regret any part of the project.”

But there was another sort of “fanatical” at work--and, in the end, it counted for more. When Clare Boothe Luce saw the movie at a private screening, she rose in the middle to declare that no “American” could possibly have made it. And Life magazine, having praised the film in a three-page spread, ran an afterthought a few weeks later, retracting its enthusiasm. This was no time, it was felt, for jokes about American institutions.

But by today’s standards, Ashton comes across as genial satire. He has none of the smarminess, the rather grubby desperation our elected representatives so often and so embarrassingly show us. Though Powel has some surprisingly contemporary moments--a Reaganesque sort of vacancy, even a hint of Sen. Alan K. Simpson (when Ashton is boasting about being a plain man)--mostly he seems too human for the role. He is a multidimensional person trying to pass himself off as a cartoon--instead of the other way around, like some of the people he evokes. And unlike them, he seems in control of the joke.