To be a good historian, you have to be somewhat decent at reading handwriting. I don’t trust other historians’ transcriptions, so I like to do my own.  This is a page from Breckinridge Long’s diary. He was the Undersecretary of State who gave testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in November 1943, and in his testimony, he conflated the number of refugees the State Department had allowed in the United States. Towards the bottom of the page, you can see his entry for January 19th.  Coincidentally, the same weekend the Board was created, the State Department underwent a massive reorganization. Long was removed from overseeing Special War Problems and was instead tasked with Congressional Relations. In his diary, he first lamented the death of Count Ciano in Italy, whom he had befriended in his days as Ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy in the late 1930s. He then writes, “The reorganization of the Dept. has created some temporary chaos and some very bad feeling….I am still happy about it and had the quietest day since have been back in the Dept.”

This page is from the Breckinridge Long collection at the Library of Congress, box 5.