Diaries, Ego Trips and Private Thoughts

Senator, that diary!

Eighty-two hundred pages of remembrances of things past, “warts and all”?

It’s an awesome thought, particularly in a world where most of us barely have time to scribble a grocery list--and where, on an ordinary day, that grocery list may be the most interesting thing we encounter.

But the journals of Sen. Robert Packwood (R-Ore.), replete with gossip, “personal observations” and descriptions of his romantic adventures, are another matter. Packwood’s chronicles are notable, say those who study or practice diary-writing, not only for their intensely candid and occasionally salacious content--but for their sheer volume as well.

These experts add that as the U.S. Senate moves to force Packwood to turn over his diary as part of its investigation of sexual misconduct charges against him, the 61-year-old senator’s predicament illustrates the way the centuries-old art of diary writing has moved from ego trip to legal trap.

A personal log of the sort kept by Packwood serves as a kind of “self-exploration and 15-cent self-analysis,” said Tristine Rainer, who has taught journal writing at UCLA Extension for 15 years. “The only way it works is if you are free from judgment (by others).”

Rainer, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on diary writing and the book “The New Diary,” described the prospect of Packwood having to turn his diaries over to his Senate peers as “the absolute ultimate invasion.”

Yet Packwood has referred to his diary in testimony and has stated that he has willed the document to the Oregon Historical Society for release after his death. He has also indicated that his detailed personal records might provide fodder for a future book, an increasingly common endeavor for politicians.

“More and more, you see politicians of all stripes keeping notes not only about their own doings, but about those of others as well, because you never know when they’re going to turn out to be useful,” USC communications professor Randall A. Lake said.

Or, in Packwood’s case, possibly incriminating and definitely embarrassing.

For example, the episode in which Packwood wrote “something like ‘and then I kissed her hard on the mouth’ strikes me as odd,” said Peter Osnos, who as publisher of Times Books in New York has overseen many political books based on diaries.

Along with such graphic depictions, Osnos said it strikes him as extraordinary not only that Packwood would keep such journals, “but that he would have them typed.”

Turning them over to a typist means “they’re not private diaries anymore,” Osnos said. “They’re written for the record, which is different from something you keep under lock and key.”

Certainly the flap over Packwood’s journals presents a far different picture than the image of an 18th-Century diarist--clutching a quill pen, writing by candlelight and spouting wisdom.

Right from the time of Samuel Pepys, the 17th-Century English shipping clerk credited with inventing the modern diary, such daybooks have contributed immeasurably to an understanding of the past, Harvard historian David Donald said.

“Think of how different our interpretation of history would have been without the Adamses” and their copious personal journals, Donald said.

Still, the “very self-important” tenor of the observations of America’s second President is part of what makes John Adams’ diaries so interesting, Donald pointed out. From Pepys to Packwood, Donald said, diarists have offered “their own spin on history”--and, by extension, “a claim on immortality, a way of assuring themselves a place in history.”

Then again, said Thomas Mallon, author of “A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries,” most diarists do trace their motivation to “some imperative of the ego.”

Politicians, seldom known for tiny egos, could especially be expected to embrace the diary as a vehicle for self-promotion, Mallon said.

“Politicians are all spin doctors by profession, and the diary is just an extension,” he said. “It gives them the chance to look noble and right, correct with no one to contradict them.

“It’s rare that people like that have the candor to let their mistakes go down on the page,” Mallon said. On the other hand, cautious diaries tend to be boring, whereas the greatest of personal journals are unself-conscious and frank. “The people who don’t hold back in their diaries are the people we tend to like the most.”

But even the most scintillating of diaries are not always credible, said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. In her biographies of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and now, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Goodwin relies heavily on journals written not only by the historical figures themselves, but by those around them.

“You never really know whether the person is truly rendering what they said, or what they wished they’d said,” Goodwin said. “They may be adding things that make them sound brilliant or subtracting things that do not.”

As well as being tools for self-embellishment, however, diaries do have to be recognized as a kind of discipline, she said.

“It takes a strong-minded and determined person” to keep up the habit of a diary, she said. Noting that Packwood has said he made a practice of writing in his journal for 30 minutes each morning--the amount of time that some of his colleagues might have spent jogging--Goodwin added that diary writing is “like exercise. It can almost become an addiction.”

But diaries also have a narcotic ingredient in the power they extend to their authors. “All writing gives the illusion of omniscience,” said Patricia Hampl, who teaches memoir writing at the University of Minnesota.

A diary in particular says, “ ‘I’m the key player, I’m the only one in the universe,’ ” Hampl said.

And “when it comes to people in politics,” she said, “you can’t emphasize enough the historical fantasy” that sets in.

But historical fantasy is not what seems to be troubling Packwood and his Senate colleagues. It is sexual reality that has them worried--both in the form of Packwood’s admitted peccadilloes and those he apparently attributes to some of his associates.

In recording such exploits, Hampl said, Packwood stepped over the diarist’s line.

“This is a man who didn’t understand that even the diary has to have rules of style, taste and discretion,” she said. “Where words are concerned, there are always rules. I think he ignored that, to his peril.”

But USC’s Lake said Packwood may quite consciously have included the sexually themed episodes that now seem so questionable.

“I don’t know whether he thought of them as sexual trophies or not, but my guess is that if he didn’t think there was anything wrong with them, then why not write them down?” Lake said. “It was a normal part of life for him, and he didn’t think there was any risk in writing it down. It was no different for him than writing that he went to the dentist.”

And UCLA diary researcher Rainer said that in recording the details of his own and other senators’ alleged indiscretions, Packwood may have been “savoring the experience again”--another aspect of diary writing.

“To record such things in a diary means that we’re not just trying to work them out,” Rainer said. “People also record what they can’t bear to forget.”

Of course, it is Packwood’s transgressions--not his votes on soybean legislation--that have captured public attention. While fueling public prurience, his diary also seems to have added a new dimension to congressional gossip.

But even the most calumnious of American political diaries couldn’t hold a candle to the tradition created by Pepys in Great Britain, said Times Books’ Osnos. British public figures continue to churn out such scandal-mongering diaries as Alan Clark’s “beady-eyed image of life in the British government under Margaret Thatcher” that kept Osnos turning the pages on a recent vacation.

“The Brits do diaries,” Osnos said. “We’re not nearly literary enough.”

Which raises another danger of diary writing. If immortality is the goal, then the journal keeper might pause to ponder the consequences of devoting 8,200 pages to his own life and times.

“There’s always the risk,” author Mallon pointed out, “that history may judge you with a yawn.”