http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21047615/site/newsweek/page/0/LBJ has 'compulsive, even lunatic, strains.' Rumsfeld is 'the rottenest.' Gore has a 'mystical fervor.' Or so wrote Schlesinger in his journals.
In recent years, keeping political diaries has fallen out of fashion. I blame this on a young Clinton-era Treasury aide named Josh Steiner, whose private journal was subpoenaed in a long-forgotten scandal. Anyone interested in history will suffer for the decline of this art form (and no, blogging is not a substitute). To see what we may be missing in the future, consider the astonishing case of the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Shortly before he died earlier this year, he instructed two of his sons to prepare his diaries for publication. The resulting book, "Journals: 1952-2000," contains juicy morsels on every one of its 858 pages.
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Schlesinger picks up much of his best stuff from friend and fellow gossip Henry Kissinger, who tells him in 1981 that Nixon had been his old, "poisonous" self at Anwar Sadat's funeral, leading Gerald Ford to remark, "Sometimes I wish I had never pardoned that son of a bitch." Later he quotes Kissinger describing George H.W. Bush as "a very petty man" and Donald Rumsfeld as "the rottenest person he had known in government."
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