This will be quick. It’s about a great story that I found. OK, it was a sentence, not a story. This is the story of that sentence.
 
In the early days of my research, I used to prowl the shelves crammed with books about U.S., European, and military history on the 11th floor of the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame. Whenever I found a promising book, odds were good that its neighbors would also contribute to the cache of information I was gathering.
 
This was the process that led me to Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971; From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle, edited by Beatrice Bishop Berle. It did not matter that I was unfamiliar with either Berle. (I learned later that they were husband and wife). Thanks to the wondrous Dewey Decimal System, their book was in a good neighborhood, and was worth a skim.
 
I especially loved finding diaries and collections of papers, mostly for their refreshing candor, but also because they made it easy to zoom in on the range of dates that I was researching. As soon as I read the sentence discussed here (soon, I promise) in a May 10, 1940 diary entry on page 312 of Berle’s book, I knew that I wanted to include it in mine. Over time, though, I had to admit that it stood out as a sentence that a writer loved too much, even though it did nothing to move his particular story along. My book’s loss is my newsletter’s gain. 

Adolf Berle was an economist and a lawyer who served first as a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s unofficial brain trust, and later as an Assistant Secretary of State. In that role, he was at the side of U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the early morning hours of May 10, 1940 as calls and telegrams began to flood in about the land and air attacks by Hitler’s forces on Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (and then into France the following day).
 
After digesting the initial flurry of news, Secretary Hull telephoned his Ambassadors in Europe for updates. Joseph Kennedy, America’s Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s (and the father of future President John F. Kennedy), who was awakened in London by Hull’s call, had not yet heard of the attack. As Secretary Hull hung up the phone, he remarked to Berle:
 
“His mind is as blank as an uninked paper.”
 
Thanks for reading,
Bill