Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

This article is about Arthur Schlesinger Jr. For his father and namesake (1888–1965), see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr..
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the early 1960s
Born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
October 15, 1917
Columbus, Ohio
Died February 28, 2007 (aged 89)
Manhattan, New York
Occupation Historian, writer
Alma mater Harvard College (1938)[1]
Period 1939–2006
Subject Politics, Social issues, History
Literary movement American liberal theory
Spouse Marian Cannon (1940–1970; divorced; 4 children)
Alexandra Emmet Allan[2] (1971–2007; his death; 1 child)

Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. (/ˈʃlɛsɪndʒər/; born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. A specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson II.[3] A Pulitzer Prize winner, Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian"[4] to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days.

In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote the popular biography Robert Kennedy and His Times several years later. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration book of the same name. He was also the son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

Early life and career

Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888–1965), who was an influential social historian at The Ohio State University and Harvard University.[5] His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew (who later converted to the German Reformed Church) and his paternal grandmother an Austrian Catholic.[6] His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, and a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition.[7] His family practiced Unitarianism.

Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his first degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938.[1] In 1940, at the age of 23, he was appointed to a three-year fellowship at Harvard. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. After failing his military medical examination, Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information. From 1943 to 1945 he served as an intelligence analyst in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA.[8]

Schlesinger's service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945. From 1946 to 1954 he was an Associate Professor at Harvard, becoming a full professor in 1954, without having earned a PhD.

Political activities before 1960

In 1947 Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Minneapolis mayor and future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith, and Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr[9] founded Americans for Democratic Action. Schlesinger acted as the ADA's national chairman from 1953 to 1954.

After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter for and an ardent supporter of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. In the 1956 election, Schlesinger – along with 30-year-old Robert F. Kennedy – again worked on Stevenson's campaign staff. Schlesinger supported the nomination of John F. Kennedy, then a Senator from Massachusetts, as Stevenson's vice-presidential running mate, but at the Democratic convention Kennedy came second in the vice-presidential balloting, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

Schlesinger had known John F. Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline in the 1950s. In 1954, the Boston Post publisher John Fox, Jr., had planned series of newspaper pieces labeling several Harvard figures, including Schlesinger, as "reds", Kennedy intervened on Schlesinger's behalf, which Schlesinger recounted in A Thousand Days.

During the 1960 campaign, Schlesinger supported Kennedy, causing much consternation to Stevenson loyalists. At the time, however, Kennedy was an active candidate while Stevenson refused to run unless he was drafted at the convention. After Kennedy won the nomination, Schlesinger helped the campaign as a (sometime) speechwriter, speaker, and member of the ADA. He also wrote the book Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? in which he lauded Kennedy's abilities and scorned Vice President Richard M. Nixon as having "no ideas, only methods...He cares about winning".[10]

Kennedy administration

After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that he serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter". Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961, he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President. He worked primarily on Latin American Affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House.

Schlesinger watching flight of Mercury-Redstone 3 with President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, and Admiral Arleigh Burke in the White House Office of the President's Secretary, May 5, 1961

In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation" that would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the President, stating that "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions".[11] He did, however, suggest,

Would it not be possible to induce Castro to take offensive action first? He has already launched expeditions against Panama and against the Dominican Republic. One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime. If only Castro could be induced to commit an offensive act, then the moral issue would be butted, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start.[12]

During the Cabinet deliberations he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion. Along with his friend, Senator William Fulbright, Schlesinger sent several memos to the President opposing the strike;[13] however, during the meetings he held back his opinion, reluctant to undermine the President's desire for a unanimous decision. Following the overt failure of the invasion, Schlesinger later lamented "In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room...I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion".[14] After the furor died down, Kennedy joked that Schlesinger "wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive!"[11] During the Cuban missile crisis, Schlesinger was not a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) but helped UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson draft his presentation of the crisis to the UN Security Council.

After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy Administration called A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1965.

Later career

Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966 as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. After his retirement in 1994 he remained an active member of the Graduate Center community as an emeritus professor until his death.

Politics

After his service for the Kennedy administration he continued to be a Kennedy loyalist for the rest of his life, campaigning for Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign in 1968 and for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980. Upon the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times, which was published in 1978.[15]

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he greatly criticized Richard Nixon as both a candidate and president. His outspoken disdain of Nixon and prominent status as a liberal Democrat led to his placement on the master list of Nixon's political opponents. Ironically, Nixon would become his next-door neighbor in the years following the Watergate scandal. He retired from teaching in 1994 but remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours.

Schlesinger was a critic of the 2003 Iraq War, calling it a misadventure. He put much blame on the media for not covering a reasoned case against the war.[16]

Personal life

Schlesinger's name at birth was Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; since his mid-teens, he had instead used the signature Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.[17]

He had five children, four from his first marriage to author and artist Marian Cannon Schlesinger and a son and stepson from his second, to Alexandra Emmet. Both Cannon and Emmet are artists. His son Stephen Schlesinger is a social scientist; his daughter, Katharine Kinderman is deceased; his daughter, Christina Schlesinger is a prominent artist and muralist; his second son, Andrew, edited his journals and letters; his third son is writer Robert Schlesinger.

As a prominent Democrat and historian, Schlesinger maintained a very active social life. His wide circle of friends and associates included politicians, actors, writers and artists spanning several decades. Among his friends and associates were President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy, Adlai E. Stevenson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, John Kenneth Galbraith, W. Averell and Pamela Harriman, Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith, Ethel Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Marietta Peabody Tree, Ben Bradlee, Joseph Alsop, Evangeline Bruce, William vanden Heuvel, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Philip and Katharine Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Walter Lippmann, President Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, George McGovern, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, Richard Goodwin, Al Gore, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Career

Education

World War II service

Educator

Democratic Party activist

Death

Mr. Schlesinger died on February 28, 2007, at the age of 89 when he experienced cardiac arrest while dining out with family members in Manhattan. The newspapers dubbed him a "historian of power".[18]

Works

His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, while harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 for his book The Age of Jackson, and another in the Biography category in 1966 for A Thousand Days.

His 1986 book The Cycles of American History was an early work on cycles in politics in the United States; it was influenced by his father's work on cycles.

He became a leading opponent of multiculturalism in the 1980s and articulated this stance in his book The Disuniting of America (1991).

In his book The Politics of Hope (1962), Schlesinger terms conservatives the "party of the past" and liberals "the party of hope" and calls for overcoming the division between both parties.[19]

Published posthumously in 2007, Journals 1952–2000 is the 894-page distillation of 6,000 pages of Schlesinger diaries on a wide variety of subjects, edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger.[20]

This is a list of his published works:

Besides writing biographies he also wrote a foreword to a book on Vladimir Putin which came out in 2003 under the same name and was published by Chelsea House Publishers.[21]

Schlesinger's papers will be available at the New York Public Library.[22]

Awards

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Douglas Martin (March 2, 2007). "Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Partisan Historian of Power, Is Dead at 89". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Mrs. Alexandra E. Allan Wed to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.". The New York Times. July 13, 1971. Archived from the original on April 17, 2009.
  3. ↑ (Martin, pp. 630–643)
  4. ↑ Tanenhaus, Sam (March 4, 2007). "Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. – History, Written in the Present Tense". The New York Times. Retrieved October 10, 2008.
  5. ↑ "WOSU Presents Ohioana Authors, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.". Ohioana Authors. WOSU. 2006. Archived from the original on September 7, 2006. Retrieved September 5, 2006.
  6. ↑ Herman, Arthur. "A Life in the Twentieth Century, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.". Commentary Magazine. Retrieved December 20, 2011.
  7. ↑ "The Age of Schlesinger by James Chace | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com. Retrieved December 20, 2011.
  8. ↑ Schlesinger, Robert (August 20, 2008). "Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Not-So-Secret Career as a Spy: My father's OSS records reveal no James Bond, but a World War II career like so many others". U.S. News & World Report. Archived from the original on September 27, 2008. Retrieved September 11, 2008.
  9. ↑ Richard Wightman Fox, _Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography_
  10. ↑ Nixon's shadow: the history of an image – David Greenberg – Google Books. Google Books. Archived from the original on January 11, 2014. Retrieved December 20, 2011.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
  12. ↑ "Cuba, 1961–1962". Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–1963. United States Department of State. 1997.
  13. ↑ The New York Public Library. "NYPL Acquires Papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr". Nypl.org. Retrieved December 20, 2011.
  14. ↑ Howard Zinn (1997). The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. Google Books. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved February 11, 2009.
  15. ↑ Wills, Gary (November 12, 1978). "Fierce in His Loyalties and Enmities". The New York Times. Retrieved February 21, 2015.
  16. ↑ Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (March 23, 2003). "Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War; Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on April 24, 2014. Retrieved January 31, 2012.
  17. ↑ Schlesinger 2000, pp. 6–7 and 57).
  18. ↑ Martin, Douglas (March 1, 2007). "Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 3, 2007. Retrieved March 1, 2007.
  19. ↑ "Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans". Writing University of Pennsylvania. August 2, 2004. Archived from the original on August 12, 2004. Retrieved October 28, 2010.
  20. ↑ Dowd, Maureen (October 7, 2007). "Social Historian". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 8, 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2007.
  21. ↑ Charles J. Shields (2003). Vladimir Putin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-6945-1.
  22. ↑ Pogrebin, Robin (November 26, 2007). "New York Public Library Buys Schlesinger Papers". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 24, 2014.
  23. ↑ "Past winners and finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  24. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1966". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on November 11, 2002. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  25. ↑ "Biography or Autobiography: Past winners and finalists by category". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on May 6, 2009. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  26. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1979". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on November 16, 2002. Retrieved March 17, 2012.

Further reading

Primary sources

External links

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