[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 27 (Thursday, March 4, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S2218]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       EULOGY FOR DANIEL BOORSTIN

  Mr. STEVENS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
attached eulogy be printed in the Record today. Dr. James H. 
Billington, Librarian of Congress, delivered this eulogy on Tuesday, 
March 2, 2004 at the funeral of Daniel Boorstin, who served as 
Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. It also appeared in Rollcall 
yesterday.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Hon. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress--Eulogy for Librarian 
         of Congress Emeritus Daniel J. Boorstin, March 2, 2004

       Dan Boorstin was a great American: the inspirational head 
     of two important national institutions; a key figure--along 
     with his friends Dillon Ripley and Roger Stevens--in the 
     cultural coming of age of our Nation's Capital; and a 
     matchless chronicler of the uniqueness, the innovative spirit 
     and the everyday practicality of our shared American 
     experience.
       He was an exuberant humanist who brought high literary 
     style to a wide popular audience. He put things together when 
     others were taking them apart. He kept history alive by 
     telling it as his story at a time when many were dehumanizing 
     it, first with ideological prejudice and then with 
     methodological pomposity. He was an optimist but also a 
     critic--providing us an early warning of the difference 
     between real and pseudo events, between people who actually 
     do things and manufactured celebrities who are simply well-
     known for being well-known.
       He created in his two great trilogies an original American 
     version of the tradition of sweeping, multivolume histories 
     that flourished in England from Gibbon to Toynbee. His 
     longtime friend and colleague Jaroslav Pelikan told me 
     yesterday that Dan had given him crucial early advice and 
     encouragement as Jary was embarking on his own monumental 
     multivolume history.
       It was fun to be with Dan in person and through his 
     writings. He mixed erudition with epigrammatic wit and 
     colorful vignettes. He could be contentious and even 
     temperamental, but almost always in defense of someone or 
     some institution to which he was loyal at a time when it was 
     being unfairly maligned.
       As Librarian of Congress he exemplified as well as 
     encouraged the highest scholarly standards. At the same time, 
     he threw open the big bronze doors to let in the widest 
     possible readership. From the time of my own arrival in 
     Washington to run the Wilson Center until the time I was 
     chosen to succeed him at the Library, he was a very special 
     example, helpmate and friend.
       Plato said that immortality lies in one's children and 
     one's books. Dan and his incomparable wife and effervescent 
     editorial collaborator, Ruth, have opened both of those 
     pathways to an undying legacy. His outstanding children have 
     spoken today; and a great extended family of readers yet 
     unborn will be benefitting from his books in the years to 
     come.
       He was a man of the book, a gift to America from the people 
     of the book. His bibliography itself fills a book. He founded 
     and was a benefactor to the Center for the Book within the 
     world's greatest collection of books at the Library of 
     Congress; and it now has--thanks to John Cole, whom he 
     appointed to head it--affiliated Centers for the Book in all 
     50 states and the District of Columbia. Dan was concerned not 
     just about illiteracy but also about alliteracy--a term he 
     coined to describe those people who can read but have lost 
     the will to do so. And he launched the plan and gained the 
     congressional support to restore the Thomas Jefferson 
     Building to its true glory as America's temple of the book.
       When he was sworn in in November 1975 as the 12th Librarian 
     of Congress in the Great Hall of that magnificent building, 
     he spoke these prophetic words: ``The computer can help us 
     find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol 
     and our resource for the unimagined question and the 
     unwelcome answer.''
       In his last years he crafted a second trilogy of books 
     largely out of what he was fond of calling the ``multimedia 
     encyclopedia'' that was and is the Library of Congress. He 
     ended up in his personal note to readers in the last volume, 
     The Seekers, asking a question that lay beyond all the 
     unwelcome answers. Has Western man, he asked, emptied meaning 
     from life by moving from seeking purposes to seeking causes--
     from deeply wondering why to simply asking how? Books and 
     family gave meaning and purpose to the rich life of this 
     man--as they do to the American culture that he loved and 
     ennobled.
       Marjorie and I--like so many of his fond admirers--will 
     miss him and the infectious enthusiasm for learning that he 
     miraculously sustained for nearly nine decades. We will 
     always be grateful for the friendship and support that he and 
     Ruth so generously and warmly extended to us and to the 
     amazing institution in which we have been privileged to 
     succeed him.

                          ____________________