Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer Page B

they proved beyond any doubt that there was no diary, there was no speech, and the whole story was the creation of an American Nazi Party leader.
    â€œA few years ago, Wally Rush and I had to set the record straight again after some speaker at an Arab youth meeting quoted from Ben Franklin’s so-called Prophecy,” said R. “The anti-Semitic Web sites still throw it around today, as if it’s true.”
    Braxton had given R his full attention during the storytelling, but now, at the ending, there was a puzzled look on the young man’s face.
    â€œWhat has that got to do with these papers, Dr. Taylor?” he asked. “Dr. Rush said there was nothing in them that meant anything. Are you suggesting he was wrong and that they charge Benjamin Franklin with something awful?”
    R had made a calculated decision about Braxton. He had decided that this inexperienced kid was at least wise enough to have looked closely at these twelve pieces of paper himself and smart enough to have seen something that, no matter what Wally said, aroused some suspicion. The words
wanton killing
appeared more than once. So did the initials B.F., among others.
    â€œOh, no, no, no,” R said, as nonchalantly as he could. “I told the story mostly as an out-loud reminder to myself to keep the Prophecy story in mind, particularly when dealing with something that suddenly turns up after hundreds of years.”
    Braxton nodded his head, twice. He got that, and he seemed to accept it. But he went on. “Do you see something here that Dr. Rush didn’t see?”
    R chose only to shrug and say, “It’s too early to say anything definitive. My interests, as you know, are in the diaries
as
diaries.” R’s cover story for coming here this morning had been that Wally had told him of the diaries, which were of special interest to R for possible inclusion in a book of diaries from the American Revolution.
    â€œThose references to B.F.,” Braxton persisted. “I thought at first they had to be referring to Ben Franklin, but Dr. Rush didn’t think so. And what about
J.A.,
maybe for John Adams? Dr. Rush pointed out that there could be millions of people with those particular initials. Did you read the McCullough book on Adams?”
    R said he did.
    â€œIt’s a great book by a great man about a great man, isn’t it?”
    R said he agreed with Braxton, at least two-thirds of it. He was not one of those so-called professional historians who resented the success of “popular” historians like David McCullough, a man R very much admired. From R’s point of view, the resenters were mostly jealous academics who claimed to be writing only for scholarly reasons but would kill to have a book on the best-seller lists. R also enjoyed reading McCullough’s book on Adams. The problem was Adams himself. R, along with Wally and most other Ben scholars, could not forgive or forget Adams’s contempt for Franklin. Adams thought Ben was personally immoral, professionally corrupt, and diplomatically and sinfully in the pocket of the French, among many other things. R, Wally and Company dismissed Adams’s attacks, as apparently Ben himself did at the time, as symptoms of Adams’s own character defects, which included rabid envy, paranoia, and profound rigidity. Ben once wrote that he considered Adams to be an honest, wise man who meant well but occasionally acted “absolutely out of his Senses.”
    But R said none of this to Braxton, who was still talking about these twelve pieces of paper.
    â€œReads like somebody did somebody in, doesn’t it?” he said. “A woman, maybe, was the victim?”
    â€œCould be, yes,” said R. Braxton was as smart as he had thought, and this was not a conversation he wished to have right now. “We’re a long way from even having such discussions.”
    R stood. He was ready to get on with what he had come to