Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and 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 S. 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 the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" 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: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote a popular biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, several years later. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration in his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency.
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 Ohio State University and Harvard University, where he directed many PhD dissertations in American history. His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew who converted to Protestantism and then married an Austrian Catholic. His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, as well as a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition. 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. After spending the 1938–1939 academic year at Peterhouse, Cambridge, as a Henry Fellow, he was appointed to a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows in the fall of 1939. At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; as such, Schlesinger would never earn a doctorate. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States entering 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, the precursor to the CIA.
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.
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, 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 Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy 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. planned a 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 consternation to Stevenson loyalists. Kennedy campaigned actively but 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."
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 Schlesinger 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.
In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation," which would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the president: "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." He, however, suggested:
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; 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." 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!" 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.
In October 1962, Schlesinger became afraid of "a tremendous advantage", which "all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics" would provide the Soviets. Schlesinger further warned that "by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers". The cause was a pre-vision of an algorithmic governance of economy by an internet-like computer network authored by Soviet scientists, particularly Alexander Kharkevich.
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, 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 CUNY Graduate Center. After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained an active member of the Graduate Center community as an emeritus professor until his death.
Later 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. At the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times, which was published in 1978.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he criticized Richard Nixon as a candidate and as president. His prominent status as a liberal Democrat and outspoken disdain of Nixon 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.
After retiring from teaching, he remained involved in politics through his books and public speaking tours. Schlesinger was a critic of the Clinton Administration, resisting President Clinton's cooptation of his "Vital Center" concept in an article for Slate in 1997. Schlesinger was also a critic of the 2003 Iraq War, calling it a misadventure. He blamed the media for not covering a reasoned case against the war.
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. He had five children, four from his first marriage to author and artist Marian Cannon Schlesinger and a son and stepson from his second marriage to Alexandra Emmet, also an artist:
Stephen Schlesinger (b. 1942), a notable author of books on foreign affairs and former director of the World Policy Institute
Katharine Kinderman (1942–2004), an author and producer, who was married to Gibbs Kinderman and later Thomas Tiffany
Christina Schlesinger (b. 1946), a prominent artist and muralist
Andrew Schlesinger, writer and editor
Robert Schlesinger, writer and editor
Career
Education
1933 Phillips Exeter Academy
1938 A.B. summa cum laude, Harvard University
1938–1939 Henry Fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge
1939–1942 Society of Fellows, Harvard University
World War II service
1942–1943 Office of War Information
1943–1945 Office of Strategic Services
Educator
1946–1954 Associate Professor of History, Harvard University
1954–1962 Professor of History, Harvard University
1966 Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
1966–1994 Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (Emeritus, 1994–2007)
Democratic Party activist
Among the founders of Americans for Democratic Action
Speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson's two presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956
Speechwriter for John F. Kennedy's campaign in 1960
1961–1964 Special Assistant to the President for Latin American affairs and speechwriting
Speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy's campaign in 1968
Speechwriter for George McGovern's campaign in 1972
Active in the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy in 1980
Death
On February 28, 2007, Schlesinger had a heart attack while dining with family at a steakhouse in Manhattan. He was taken to New York Downtown Hospital, where he died at the age of 89. His New York Times obituary described him as a "historian of power." He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Works
He won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 for his book The Age of Jackson, covering the intellectual environment of Jacksonian democracy.
His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism.
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.
He won a second Pulitzer in the Biography category in 1966 for A Thousand Days.
His 1986 book The Cycles of American History, a collection of essays and articles, contains "The Cycles of American Politics," an early work on the topic; 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).
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.
Selected bibliography
This is a partial listing of Schlesinger's published works:
Articles
"The Future of Socialism". Partisan Review, May/June 1947.
"The Crisis of American Masculinity" Esquire, November 1958.
"The Many Faces of Communism, Part 1: The Theological Society". Harper's Magazine, January 1960.
"Origins of the Cold War". Foreign Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1, October 1967.
"Against Academic Apartheid". The Social Contract, Vol. 1, No. 1, Inaugural Issue, Fall 1990.
Books
1939 Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress
1945 The Age of Jackson
1949 The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom
1950 What About Communism?
1951 The General and the President, and the Future of American Foreign Policy
1957 The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919–1933 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. I)
1958 The Coming of the New Deal: 1933–1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II)
1960 The Politics of Upheaval: 1935–1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III)
1960 Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?
1962 The Politics of Hope
1963 Paths of American Thought (ed. with Morton White)
1965 A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
1965 The MacArthur Controversy and American Foreign Policy
1967 The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966
1967 Congress and the Presidency: Their Role in Modern Times
1968 Violence: America in the Sixties
1969 The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power, and Violence in America
1970 The Origins of the Cold War
1973 The Imperial Presidency – reissued in 1989 (with epilogue) and 2004
1978 Robert Kennedy and His Times – adapted into a 1985 TV miniseries
1983 Creativity in Statecraft
1983 The Almanac of American History – revised edition, 2004
1986 The Cycles of American History
1988 JFK Remembered
1988 War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt
1988 Cleopatra, New York: Chelsea House, (Hoobler, Dorothy; Hoobler, Thomas; introductory essay "On leadership" by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. )
1990 Is the Cold War Over?
1991 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
2000 20th Century Day by Day: 100 Years Of News From January 1, 1900, to December 31, 1999
2000 A Life in the 20th Century, Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950
2004 War and the American Presidency
2007 Journals 1952–2000
2011 Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F Kennedy (Mrs. Kennedy's interview shortly after her husband's assassination)
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.
Schlesinger's papers will be available at the New York Public Library.
Awards
1946 Pulitzer Prize for History – The Age of Jackson
1955 Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1958 Bancroft Prize – The Crisis of the Old Order
1958 Francis Parkman Prize – The Crisis of the Old Order
1966 National Book Award in History and Biography – A Thousand Days
1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography – A Thousand Days
1978 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
1979 National Book Award in Biography – Robert Kennedy and His Times
1987 Elected member of the American Philosophical Society
1998 National Humanities Medal
2003 Four Freedoms Award
2006 Paul Peck Award
2006 Niebuhr Medal Awarded by Elmhurst College to an individual who exemplifies the ideals of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr. Schlesinger was greatly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr.
See also
Political history in the United States, for historiography
Footnotes
Further reading
Aldous, Richard. Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (W.W. Norton, 2017) online book review
Diggins, John Patrick, ed. The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the Challenge of the American Past, Princeton UP, 1997. online free
Feller, Daniel, "Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945–2000 U of Missouri Press, 2000; pp. 156–169.
Martin, John Bartlow. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. New York: Doubleday. 1976.
Thomas Meaney, "The Hagiography Factory" (review of Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, Norton, 486 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 3 (8 February 2018), pp. 13–15. "Aldous has chosen an apt subtitle for his biography: Schlesinger was an 'imperial' historian in his willingness to take up the burden of the American empire's PR, though 'The Imperious Publicist' would have served just as well." (p. 14)
Sue Saunders, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, February 15, 2006.
John William Ward 1955. Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age. New York: Oxford University Press
Wilentz, Sean, "The High Table Liberal" (review of Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, Norton, 486 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 2 (8 February 2018), pp. 31–33. "[T]he subtitle of Richard Aldous's otherwise solid biography is... erroneous. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was in no way an 'imperial' historian; he was an anti-imperial historian." (p. 31)
Primary sources
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. A Thousand days: John F Kennedy in the White House. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1965.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950. (2000), autobiography, vol 1.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. Journals: 1952–2000 (2007)
External links
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. papers 1922–2007, held by the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library
In Depth interview with Schlesinger, December 3, 2000
Eisler, Kim. "Arthur Schlesinger Dishes Dirt", Washingtonian, March 6, 2008.
An incredible writer and a proud Liberal all his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and "court philosopher" of the Kennedy administration was 89 when he died.
The Washington Post obituary
1917 births
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20th-century American historians
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