The Whole Truth and Nothing But

by Sandy Cody

If you really want to get to know someone, sneak a peak into their diary. That’s where you’re most likely to find their unguarded thoughts - the things they don’t let themselves express to the world at large. Everyone has to let their hair down sometimes and a diary or a journal is one way to do that. Maybe that’s why so many famous people have kept diaries.

 I remember reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys way back in high school. He was an important figure in his day and he wrote in his diary faithfully for ten years, from 1660 until 1669, leaving us a record that is probably more insightful of the time than the official historical records. His pages detail not just the facts about big events like the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, but also his feelings regarding these things. About the plague, he wrote “... how sad it is to see the streets empty of people.” Thumbing through an old copy of his diary, I see entries like that on almost every page. In the privacy of his diary, it was people in the street who mattered, not matters of state.

 Another book most of us read in school was The Diary of a Young Girl. The girl, of course, is Anne Frank and the book is perhaps the most poignant reminder of the

damage done by intolerance and racial hatred. In one passage, just after she describes hearing the “approaching thunder” of Nazi boots, she writes: “And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better.” We know that for her, it didn’t, but her thoughts, both the frightened and hopeful ones, have survived and have helped put a human face on an evil that, taken in totality, is almost impossible to comprehend.

 This is becoming much more serious that I intended. Let’s move on. Harry S. Truman (the only president from my home state of Missouri) kept a diary while he was in office. Here he recorded the opinions he dare not express publicly. One example, written after an appointment with an important official: “This man not only wants to run the country, but the universe and the entire Milky Way.” Of someone else, he wrote: “Baloney Peddler.” How’s that for telling it like it is.

 As for me, I don’t keep a diary in the usual sense, but I do keep a journal of the books I read. Not particularly enlightening to future historians, but I enjoy looking through it and remembering the stories and the thoughts they prompted. It serves as a reminder of what I was thinking and feeling at a certain time. Maybe that’s what diaries do, even for famous people.

 And now ...

 I hope you’ll forgive a brief commercial message. I admit it. All this talk about diaries was inspired by my recently-released book, Lethal Journal. In this story, the victim kept a journal and it is through his entries there that we get to see him as something other than a corpse. We come to understand the reason he was murdered and, ultimately, figure out who killed him.

 How about you? Any journalists or diary-keepers out there?