Speaking at a literary luncheon at Washington's Statler Hilton Hotel, Felix Frankfurter, oldest justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, warned the guests that most political diaries are scarcely worth the research to blow them to hell. Frankfurter, whose tape-recorded reminiscences were published last year, explained that few diarists deliberately lie, but they are all prey to "the fallibility of the human memory, the infirmities of the human mind, the weakness of human understanding and recollection." And intelligent, articulate diarists are the very worst kind: they couple their love of the language with their...
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